He Spends A Lot Of Time With His Friends

Thursday | January 31, 2019

Love Letters Relationships

He Spends A Lot Of Time With His Friends

We’ll chat at 1. Link here.

My fiancé and I have pretty independent lives. I work six to seven days of the week, and he is off on Fridays and Saturdays. Every Friday, he will go to his best friend’s house (his bf and his wife recently had a baby). I feel that my fiancé is unable to do things on his own and craves being around people. He can’t even sit and watch a movie on his own. That’s besides the point though.

My question is: Is it wrong for me to be upset or angry that he doesn’t try to make an effort to make a plan where I am included? Because he’ll often go to them on a Friday, and then we all do something together on the Saturday – but then they all talk about things from Friday, and it really makes me feel left out. I suppose I would have less of a problem if it was just his friend that he was seeing, as opposed to him seeing that whole family and spending so much time in a group.

Those friends are more independent and can easily go without seeing him for weeks on end, but he seems lost without them. I don’t know what to do and how to approach it. I don’t want to be the horrible fiancé and say that he is too involved with them and that I don’t want him to see them anymore. But I just feel that some weekends he can make the sacrifice and not go to them, and that he can wait until we can go as a couple. He always says that his friends are my friends, but at the moment, I have no relationship with them. Their baby was born over the summer, and he has seen them pretty much every week since. I’ve only seen them three times since then. What do I do?

– Friends

You don’t win much by setting rules about who your fiancé can see and when. It’s more productive to talk about your feelings and to give him the chance to help you feel more included.

But before you do, please understand that your fiancé is a social person who doesn’t want to stay home alone just to prove he can. That’s OK. Also, he clearly loves being part of this friend’s family. There is nothing wrong with that.

The issue here is that the bond he has with them sometimes feels stronger than the one he has with you, right? He’s probably known the friends longer. They have history. That means that instead of feeling like the primary partner, you become the guest.

Talk to your fiancé about how you can work on this together. Again, the answer isn’t “stay home and wait for me.” A better solution might be balance. You have your own community, right? Maybe it would be help to spend time with people in your life, too. The two of you would benefit from making new memories with a variety of people. Saturdays can be reserved for a change of scenery.

– Meredith

Readers? How should the LW deal with her partner’s relationship with this couple?

Friends Jealousy Relationships

Featured Comment

Why are you engaged to this person? You sound like you don’t think much of him. Anyway, you work 6-7 days a week. He should be able to see who he wants when he wants. I’m not sure why you are so offended by him and his friends discussing things that happened when you weren’t there. You aren’t there much.

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