Can Single Women Be Friends With Married Men?

I only ask because I was friends with a lot of single guys throughout the last few years, like best buddies kind of friends, and now basically all of them are married.  Everybody says that they don’t want things to change from how they used to be, but they have changed…a lot.  I was hanging out with a guy friend of mine tonight and we went for coffee and he was telling me all about his struggle with depression, which he hasn’t really talked about before, and how he went to see a psychiatrist for the first time.  We talked and laughed for a few hours about life and just everything, and really connected over our struggles with mental health.  He confided in me about how he tended to isolate himself and found it hard to sleep sometimes.  I felt really close to him.  But here’s the thing, we’ve always been close.  I just have really personal relationships with my friends, even the guys, and now that they’re all married, I’m starting to realize in a big way that I can’t be this open and close to them anymore, it just doesn’t seem appropriate.  And the last thing I want to do is all of a sudden lead them on.  This evening when I was waiting for my friend to come pick me up I found myself self conciously doing my hair, and making myself “prettier” then normal.  I even did my makeup which I normally don’t do these days because I usually can’t be bothered.  I guess I wanted him to notice me…and he did.  He reached across the table and gently pulled on one of the spirals in my hair, commenting on how curly it was.  I have to admit that it felt really nice to have my efforts noticed but immediately alarm bells were going off in my head.  Boundaries had been crossed.  I’m not sure I even feel comfortable spending time alone with him anymore because tonight actually evoked some feelings and that really bothered me.  (I used to have a crush on him many years ago before he was married.)

Yes I want attention from men and yes I definitely get lonely sometimes, but I’m not willing to risk friendships over it.  Tonight felt like a date.  I’m sure the waitress thought we were a couple the way we were so comfortable with each other, and how flirty and friendly he was with me.  It also doesn’t help that his marriage is on the rocks right now and his wife wants to have an open marriage now, and aparantly has a boyfriend but I’ve been fighting myself not to bring it up and talk to him about it because it’s really none of my business.  I can’t be the one to rescue him…it’s so dangerous..

So….what do I do now?  I don’t want to just ignore him… but do I have to explain all of this complicated stuff with him or do I just deliberately make an effort to hang out with him and his wife together or else him with a group of others?  This is also not the first time that this has happened… it’s happend with other married guy friends too.  It scared me just how easily these feelings came up and how quickly they could escalate if I wanted them to.  I guess this is how afairs start….and that’s the LAST thing I ever want to be involved in.

It kind of sucks being a single person at that age where all my friends are married.  I don’t really know what to do with that….

Annoyed; Very Throroughly Annoyed

I am so annoyed right now and I’m trying to let it go but what happened this afternoon at lunch is just irking me and won’t go away.  I went to church with my sister and her husband this morning and then afterwards we went for lunch with 2 other married couples that they are friends with.  First of all, being in a group of 7 people where everybody is paired off and married except me is awkward and uncomfortable enough.  I kept trying to give myself a mental pep talk saying that it was great that they were including me and wanted me to come along and that I should be more thankful for this situation but that didn’t last long.  They all kept talking about married life and marriage topics and ring sizes etc. etc. and I just couldn’t relate to any of it.  I’m so sick of marriage topics, and wedding talk that it just makes me over the top frustrated and well aware of how single I am and how fucked up I feel and it brings out all my insecurities of ever finding a good man that can have grace and understanding for all my crazy.  The topic turned to word games (which are my favourite, I’ve always loved word games) and they started talking about UpWords and how you’re not allowed to just play an “s” at the end of a word to make it plural, you have to form a new word as well.  Then they started trying to think of words that you could add an “s” to at the beginning to make it a new word.  I said you can take the word et and put an “s” in front of it to make it set and the whole group got on my case saying that it wasn’t a real word.  I told them it was another word meaning the past tense of eat and still nobody believe me and were all loud and in my face about it.  Finally I grabbed my iPhone out of my bag and looked it up and showed them the definition.  Everybody was still skeptical and rolling their eyes at it saying that it was ridiculous and shouldn’t be a word.  I was thoroughly annoyed by this point.  THEN, my brother-in-law had the brilliant idea to state that if nobody had heard of this word before or any other word then it shouldn’t be real.  That was the most absurd and ridiculous thing that I had ever heard in my life.  All of these people were educated people and yet they were so ignorant about this statement.  All of the couples around the table vigorously nodded their heads and voiced their agreement with the notion.  I was thoroughly pissed off at this point and trying really hard not to show it.  Obviously they’re not enlightened enough to follow or accept the rules and words of the english language.  If you applied that notion to everything else in life it just proves over and over how ridiculous it is.  I could look at a calculous problem and if I had never seen it before, instead of following the rules to solve it, just claim that it isn’t real.  Absurd.

Fuck it.  I hate loud people who claim they are right about everything and that only their opinions matter.

This is why I probably won’t be hanging out with these people ever again.  My brother-in-law has already been getting on my nerves these past few days but this took the cake.  I’ll see my sister and her husband again obviously but I don’t want to hang out in their happy little married circle, it’s obviously not for me.