On my most recent waiting room adventure, I happened upon the Ladies Home Journal. I flipped through the pages, killing the time and avoiding the dual annoyance of both The Situation’s & Larry the Cable Guy’s voices pouring out from the television bolted in the corner. Normally I enjoy a bit of “LIVE! with Regis and Kelly” in the morning, but with these two on the program (yes, at the same time, if you can believe it) I opted for the least boring looking magazine I could find and settled in for an unknown amount of time while my grandmother had her ultrasound.
To my delight, a pretty interesting article caught my eye. Coincidences never cease to follow me, as its content bore extreme relevance to a recent conversation I’d had with a good girlfriend of mine. If this was some higher power’s way of attempting to get me to see this particular topic from a different view point, it failed miserably. I’m pretty open-minded, but I couldn’t help but believe that this author is full of baloney. (Either that, or she buys her own bs she’s selling, in which case I’ve got no doubt that one day the error of her ways will make itself known. It’d be interesting to follow her to see the outcome!)
I use the term “selling”, because she’s got a book. Here it is:
The title of the magazine piece is “Why Every Married Woman Needs a Guy Best Friend” and it is written by a woman named Iris Krasnow. It starts out like this: “I'll Just Say it: I believe every married woman needs a cute, sensitive, slightly flirtatious guy best friend. Discuss.” Well, discuss we shall…. I’ll start. I think this viewpoint seems like a dangerous recipe for marital disaster!
The author of this piece goes on to explain that we married gals must all have another man in our lives: one to flirt with and to feel mysterious with, because the mystery is of course gone for our husbands. These men we’ve married and whom many of us have procreated with, obviously, could never still find us as fascinating and intriguing as they did Pre-Marriage. After all, they see terribly unflattering sides of us, like a baby making its way out of our vaginas or the feces we’d forgotten to flush in our sleep deprived stupor after having taken care of said baby all night. Both, we can all agree, are seriously unsexy things. And even if some of our hubbies haven’t bared witness to either of the above mentioned scenarios, they undoubtedly know many other dreadful truths about us: that our legs aren’t naturally silky smooth, because (you guessed it) they’ve seen proof of the razor and some stray shavings left over in our shared shower once or twice…. And because they’ve smelled our morning breath, have seen us flip out, fall apart and watched as our breasts plummeted to depths that no one’s poor boobies ever should. ERGO: The mystique is gone. Never to be retrieved. And we conceited females naturally need a man in our lives at all times who finds us to be wonderfully mysterious. (Excuse me while I gag.) Other men who believe we’re as smart, gorgeous, and wonderful as we pretend to be with our witty conversation, plastered on make-up, and squeezed into Spanx undergarments. These “friendships” with other men, however, should remain strictly “passionate of mind and chaste of body”, says Ms Krasnow. Because, she tells us, only an idiot would ruin this good thing they’ve got going on by complicating it with sex. (Holding back sarcastic laughter.) Oh how naïve a concept…………………
I’m not saying I didn’t, at all, understand her viewpoint. I actually did. In theory, it sounds pretty nice. She points out that even though we love our spouses and “connect” in other ways than in just the bedroom, there are still some things that we do not connect on. There are the moments where we desire to share excitement over something that our significant other will only half pay attention to, say, while the big game is on. And we may want to talk topics and do things with our spouses that they just really don’t understand our enthusiasm about. Of course this all makes sense. No one is interested in every single thing that their partner is interested in. And let’s face facts here, after being married for years married folks can have a tendency to tune one another out. But I don’t believe her prescription to this problem is the right way to go about dealing with it. I mean, seriously? Enter: other straight male to pick up all of husband’s slack. This hardly seems conducive to having a better marriage.
I’m not going to be completely unreasonable and try to crucify this woman for her opinion. I get it that there’s different strokes for different folks. But I can tell you right now that what works for her would not work for me. And I think I’ve got a pretty solid argument as to why it would not.
When my husband looks at me like I’ve got three heads, or worse he doesn’t look at me at all, I’ve got my girlfriends to turn to. When all else fails and I feel like I’m talking to a brick wall, I’ve got facebook to vent to: A “wall” that typically answers back. I just think that by going to another (straight) man instead would be playing with fire here. We’ve all seen the gay man taken up as the “hottest new accessory” in recent years. Gals nowadays have a fab gay guy on their arms like it's this season's hottest new Prada bag, parading him around while introducing him as the "gay husband". (See here why one gay male detests this trend.) These men provide for the women who befriend them, the filling in of a void that Ms Krasnow speaks about. They give compliments when the hubbies have long since stopped, “You look GORGE!”, “That outfit is FIERCE!”, “This new Louis Vuitton corset you’re wearing makes your tits look AMAZE!” There’s no shortage of ego boosts here. And they will accompany their lady pals on marathon Neiman Marcus shopping sprees, and to be fair and not stereotype too much, anywhere else they and this female friend like to go, doing things that they both similarly enjoy. They’re the companion to things which these gals’ husbands would never want to be a part of in a million years, and discuss all the latest gossip that the husbands could not care less about. They’re essentially filling in all of the blanks left by the husbands, without the bitchiness or cattiness of that another female may posess. But when you throw in two heterosexual people of opposing genders who find common interests, confide in one another, and do things like laugh over wine with each other (Please see article in which the author gushes over Derrin, her incredible next door neighbor who is a master chef and whom she describes as “curious and extroverted, a divorced man of 60 with a gorgeous smile.”) you are playing with fire, in my most humble opinion.
She addresses the label “emotional affair” and argues that all relationships outside of our marriages could be labeled as such, whether between two women, two men, or a woman and man because they are all relationships we’ve sought out to “stimulate our whole beings”. She completely rejects the notion that her relationships with straight males who are not her husband are emotional affairs. But this is where she’s lost me. I’ve got some great gal pals, and I do not disagree that they help me to be my best version of myself, but there’s no possibility of messy emotions coming into play for us. See, even though I’ve got some beautiful friends, I don’t think in speaking about our friendship I’d have addressed how gorgeous their smiles are or anything else about their outward appearances the way she did when describing her male friend. There’s also no physical attraction there at all, because simple biology dictates that our “doors don’t swing that way”. Well, in most cases. But even with my gal pals who are homosexual or bisexual, it would take for me to also be of the same sexual orientation for there to be any kind of “risk”. And yes, I believe there is a certain risk involved when a woman chooses to have male friends like this author suggests having. Take into consideration that many a man and woman have tried through the years to be just friends, and then one day those folks weren’t in the right mind or were not strong enough to resist the temptation that had built up between them. I understand that while in these friendships those individuals may have completely intended to keep things platonic. (“Intended to” being the key words.) But why put yourself in the position of being around a person of the opposite sex whom you admire and that you get along fabulously with, when you are married? We as adults know that emotions are messy, and life is messy, and we’ve already got minimal time with our spouses in between all of life’s other attention stealers. Children, jobs, in-laws, finances can all interfere with our relationships with our spouses. And sure, we all need someone to turn to when we’re stressed out or broken down, or going through a rough patch with our husbands. I just happen to believe that our mothers, sisters, girlfriends, and therapists are better alternatives to charming men who listen to us, show compassion towards what we are feeling, and who are seemingly perfect in the ways our husbands have failed to be. Is it worth the possible repercussions?
I want to be specific in my disagreement, here. I am all for mixed gender friendships, but when you are in a monogamous marriage, these male/female friendships should be kept strictly as “couple friendships”. This is to say that if I have a male friend, he’s a friend of my husband’s as well, and this friend and I don’t “kick it” alone. We do not have lingering conversations, whether over a glass of wine or over a telephone. We don’t have one on one outings where my hubs isn’t present. And there’s no way in hell my hubby would be one of these “straight male friends” to another married woman. Oh HAIL no!
Here’s the part where you chime in… I’m prepared to hear it all- how right I am, how you believe this lady who wrote the article must be on crack, how some homewreckin’ whore stole your man after claiming she was just his “friend”…. Or, how insecure I must be, that I’m close minded, that if I trust my husband then I’ve got nothing to worry about so I obviously must NOT trust him. Whatever it is, I promise to respond. I want to hear what others think about this theory. Whether you agree or disagree, I still want to know what you’ve got to say about it. Because, the idea that our husbands should be completely comfortable and confident with themselves, with us and with our marriages and happily welcome another heterosexual man into our lives to make up in the areas they’re lacking, is just mind boggling to me any way I twist it.
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