Married Couples

sld0618

Random, but if none if your friends are married....then how do you find married couples to be friends with? FI and I are wanting to get a few different married couple groups that we hang out with sometimes.  He brings it up all the time.  So I tell him to start going up to couples at dinner with wedding rings on. haha.  He'll never do it, but it's funny to image! 

I just feel like everyone else that I'm friends with have kind of stop hanging out with me as much because I'm more about doing happy hour or dinner rather than going out until 2-3 in the morning getting wicked trashed.

Ideas?!?

Tanq&Tonic

I never really sorted our friends by their marital status. Plenty of our unmarried couples and single friends have grown out of the crazy party phase, and a few of our married friends still go balls out in a way that exhausts me to think about.  Over the past few years, I've just naturally started spending more time with foodie friends who want to cook or try great new restaurants versus clubby friends who are always getting trashed and I have to drive them home   The other thing I've found is that 1x1 time, versus group events, helps to keep things lower key even with the 'party animals'

breaness

In Response to <a href="http://forums.theknot.com/Sites/theknot/Pages/Main.aspx/local-wedding-boards_hawaii_married-couples?plckFindPostKey=Cat:Local%20Wedding%20BoardsForum:73Discussion:31571e2b-a10d-4e76-ba1f-b963b0cd99ffPost:c6af03be-2e06-4bb4-9581-70e931e071af">Re: Married Couples</a>:
[QUOTE]I never really sorted our friends by their marital status. <strong>Plenty of our unmarried couples and single friends have grown out of the crazy party phase, and a few of our married friends still go balls out in a way that exhausts me to think about. </strong> Over the past few years, I've just naturally started spending more time with foodie friends who want to cook or try great new restaurants versus clubby friends who are always getting trashed and I have to drive them home   The other thing I've found is that 1x1 time, versus group events, helps to keep things lower key even with the 'party animals'
Posted by Tanq&Tonic[/QUOTE]

<div>This is something I meant to point out on the DW board. When our "married w/ kids" friends started excluding us from events because they were all kid events, we started to find couples to hang out with who were boring like us ;)</div>

motoLyn

We have two married couple friends and one of them has a kid.  We don't hang out with them as much.  Instead we actually hang out with our single friends more often.  But then the only times we go hang out is when we're doing activities like surfing and mountain biking and the occasional dinner.  Don't get me wrong the singles still go out and drink and try to pick up others, we just don't go out when they do that.  I think FI and I keep to ourselves a LOT.  The married couple with a kid keeps telling is they can't wait till we have a little one of our own.  Yeah.....

AKWinterBride

I still haven't figured out how to make friends once you are an adult.  It's such an odd situation.  Most of  my friends up here got married and had kids so as someone said above, we have been excluded from some stuff (which I am glad of, I can't take going to a kids birthday party every weekend) but we love hanging out with eachother so it's not been a big deal for us. 

Very sad story though, one of my really good friends told me yesterday her and her husband are getting a divorce.  I would NEVER have expected it, it sounds like she is just over it and is leaving.  I'm so sad, I was at their wedding, I was at the birth of their first child, and they are already divorcing?  Granted, they've been together for 13 years, but it's just sooooo sad. 

breaness

AK: That is so sad! Our best friend and his wife were having major troubles when she was pregnant, but they seem to be happier than ever now. They have been together forever and they really are wonderful together. I couldn't even imagine how I'd feel if they got a divorce-- I'm close to them the way you are with your friend... was at the wedding, was at the hospital when their son was born.

I have to agree. Making friends as adults is weird. Sometimes it's easy to make work friends, but in my current job everyone's attitude is so awful I would never want to take that home with me. For me it's easiest to just make friendships out of aquaintances than friendships out of nothingness.

Tanq&Tonic

Agree that making new friends as we get older can be hard.  Somehow I think I am just less patient & less tolerant of things that I would have rolled with in my younger day.  Behave like a douche?  Talk about yourself a lot?  Shortchange what you owe for dinner?  I totally make a judgement and then invest less time in you immediately :P  Part of it is simply that I have less time to lollygag.

kaesha

We don't actively seek out people based on martial status either. It's more about common interests.

sparklegirl84

I agree, finding new friends as an adult is a challenge. I'm lucky that we live in the same area with friends we grew up with and have a big group of friends that still live here. My FI and I are a few of the last ones to marry and last ones to have kids though it seems. We still get invited to all the "family" things though, like this weekend I'm taking my nephew to our friends for easter brunch and egg hunt with a zillion kiddos there. It's hard for us to go out and do "couples" weekend getaways or dinners because they all have kids they can't get sitters for. It's made us appreciate our freedom

sld0618

I totally agree with you girls and I guess I'm thinking maybe being friends with another married couple will give us the common grounds.  Like literally when I say how come we don't hang out anymore, my friends say because you never want to go out late and party.  We're just in different times of our lives and it's hard to find people that are in common grounds as me.

AKWinterBride

Yep, that will happen SLD.  I moved up here away from my amazing group of friends in WI and really just made friends with the people my brother & SIL are friends with - aka, married.  So when they started having kids, I once again was excluded because I don't have kids.  It's just an odd dynamic when you're an adult, sometimes I wish we lived back in WI, my friends there are so great!

dianab0237

 I completley understand your situation. Both my fiance and I have sort of slipped from our friends too (both singles and marrieds) not because we don't try to hang out, but because we are all in seperate stages of life.  When we all have plans to hang out, something else always comes up. But we all understand that life just gets in the way sometimes.  We just finished up a pre-marital course and one of the suggestions was to try to stay away from friends who are negative about their spouses or the institution of marriage.  My fiance really took this to heart and wants to find other postive couples to associate with. Like other girls have said, making friends when you're an adult is a lot different than when you were a kid on the playground. We have more judgements against people than we did before. I would say, try to join clubs that are specifically for married couples like travel clubs, volunteer programs, church, etc. where you can find common interests.

TripleAubs

I agree that it is harder to make friends as an adult! I usually try to befriend the girls that DH's friends date and when I like them, hope they get married! We do hang out together with a few couples, but I still see my girlfriends who are single. We just hang out one on one instead of as a group.

That being said, we have managed to connect with new couples from our church, which has been really really great. I think another great way to meet people would be to join some sort of group, like a dance class, outdoors group or something like that. I'm not very outgoing and neither is DH, so being in a group setting where you are forced to interact definitely helps us make new friends!