Let's Just Be Friends

by Gwen Cooper — October 3, 2007

I'm learning that part of being a couple is the making of "couple friends." It's all well and good to hang out with your significant other and some of your single friends, but sometimes a couple just needs another couple. Making and keeping couple friends, however, can be an endeavor as fraught with conflict and disappointment as coupling up in the first place.

I remember Robert and I once meeting another couple at a wedding overseas. Because it was a "destination wedding" that took place over the course of a week, all of the guests bonded with each other much more quickly and intensely than might have been the case attending an ordinary wedding back home. Anyway, Robert and I joke that we went through the entire cycle of a couple friendship with this other couple over the course of about two days—we met them at the rehearsal dinner, bonded with them that night, heard them declare several times that we were their "new best friends" and would "have to hang out all the time back in the City." Then the two of them fought and broke up at the wedding itself, and we were left to counsel them separately as best we could (awkward, to say the least, since we barely knew them—but they insisted on coming to us for advice). As is always the case when a couple you're friends with implodes, you end up having to pick sides. Since we were left to make sure the female half of this couple got back safely from the wedding to the hotel, it seems we ended up taking her side by default.

Finding the right fit in another couple can be a dicey proposition—it's very easy to end up loving one half of the couple more than the other, but ultimately the two of you will have to deal with both sides. And, ideally, you want a situation where both you and your significant other are equally comfortable being left alone with either half of the other couple. I've been to dinner parties where I've ended up stuck talking to someone I can't stand, simply because my boyfriend is best friends with the man's wife, let's say, since college. And, occasionally, you have to deal with the couple who wants to be more than "just friends." I've never been keen on becoming a part of the wife-swapping circuit, but it's astonishing how many couples looking to swing are out and about in Manhattan these days.

Because it's so hard to find the right balance, Robert and I are always on the lookout for new couple friends. We went out last night with a casual work acquaintance of his and her husband. Our hopes were high that we might be able to add a new couple friendship to our rotation. But, sadly, while she was a delight, he was somewhat on the stiff and boring side—and also prone to getting large chunks of food stuck in his teeth, which, since I was sitting directly across from him all night, just grossed me out.

"Making couple friends is sort of like dating," I said to Robert after dinner. "Except that when you decide they're too loud or too cheap or their jokes are too racist or whatever, it's not like you can say to them, 'I don't want to date you, but we can still be friends...'"

Gwen Cooper is the author of Diary of a South Beach Party Girl, recently published by Simon & Schuster. To read all of Gwen Cooper's posts in "The Dating Life," click here.