Tom and I caught the last 40 minutes or so—and since we celebrated our 17th wedding anniversary on Sunday, we felt justified in laughing our asses off at his riffs about marriage. “Married people are disgusting!” Rock said and we howled at our own disgustingness. “You ever been to dinner with six neutered adults?”
Yeah, we’re boring.
“Married and bored or single and looooonely,” Rock said.
“All good relationships are boring,” he said. “The only exciting relationships are the bad ones.”
We laughed hardest at the “grown man playdate”—wives putting their husbands together in a room so they can make friends. “He likes baseball, just like you…”
Oh god, the grown man playdate. We have so been there and will be there again. I’ve had a few close friends whose husbands were such a bad match for Tom, the playdate was painful to witness. We gave up ever trying to make it work and settled for socializing only sans boys.
I have other friends with husbands Tom can make nice with (and vice versa) now and then, but it’s a stretch. By the end of a long evening, Tom is worn out and retreats to his happy place. I can see it happen and it’s time to go home.
We have some couples friends we can hang with easily, although we wouldn’t necessarily choose to hang with our same-sex counterparts one-on-one. As a foursome it works, as twosomes, not so much.
From time to time, in the perpetual quest for new couples friends, we go on couples dates, which are every bit as awkward and stressful as date-dates. Sometimes couples first dates end with everyone getting way too drunk—just like date-dates. Sometimes second dates occur, sometimes everyone slinks off and pretends the whole thing never happened. Sometimes these first dates feel like we have found our soulmates but more often than not, it was just a deceiving first-date glow.
The quest for couples friends is one of the difficulties of marriage that no one tells you about. Are you old enough to remember the show Thirtysomething? What a big lie that show was. Once past their 20s, few people have a gang to run with anymore. It’s the couples-friends version of all the rosy romantic bullshit that is shoved down our throats our whole lives. Just like romance fades into boring (if comforting and no less valuable) marriage, friendships get more peripheral and less vital—and I don’t mean less important, but they pulse with less juice. If you have one or two decent friendships on top of your marriage, you’re ahead of a lot of people.
I found Rock’s Married People schtick on YouTube and I’m laughing at it again. I won’t post it here, what with the whole copyright thing, but go find it yourself. If you’re married, you can laugh at yourself. If you’re single, feel free to laugh at me.
2 comments:
You think it's hard to find someone compatible enough to marry? Well, it's way harder to find other couples the two of you are compatible with; that kind of four-way relationship has to work so many ways that it's amazing we ever find anybody to befriend. Jeez, thank God we're not swingers. I can't begin to think how difficult that must be.
Yeah, we definitely end up grading those couples friendships on a curve. If nobody hates each other, it's a love connection.
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