The group of people who cause me to come closest to committing the deadly sin of envy are not the rich.
It's the married couples who have close friends who are also married couples. These are couple-friends with whom they not only can do dinner and a movie, but road trips, cruises and other far-flung jaunts.
We do many of the above as a single couple -- if that makes sense -- and often find ourselves eavesdropping on the jovial conversations of groups of couple-friends. We always say the same thing to each other: "Boy, they sure would be fun to hang with."
And I can't count the times we've suggested doing all of the above with couples we like. They agree that we should get together. But the getting together doesn't come together. Everyone seems to be too busy.
In particular, married traveling companions are nearly impossible to come by. (In the case of cruises, of which we've taken several, we always seem to ask the couple whose husband or wife can't stand to be on boats.)
I looked online to see how we might be the problem ... and found we were not alone.
In "Couple seeking couple for good time," a 2009 Salon.com article, Ryan Blitstein bemoaned the fact that he and his girlfriend couldn't find other couples to pal around with.
"My Facebook profile is bursting at the seams with hundreds of acquaintances, colleagues and contacts, many within walking distance," he wrote. "But I can count on one hand the number I'd even take out for a drink." (My Facebook profile was 1,209 as of this writing. But I can count on one hand the number who make up couples with whom Dre and I can get a date.)
Blitstein blamed the problem partly on having moved four times in the past 11 years. "This peripatetic lifestyle is compounded by the fact that my girlfriend and I don't have traditional office jobs," he wrote. "She's an artist who works out of a private studio. I'm a freelance writer." That could be part of our problem. Dre, a transplant from the Pelican State, is also a freelance writer who works from home and hasn't made close friends here. I have managed to maintain several single girlfriends, while he has either lost contact with pals from high school and college, or lives too too far away from them to see them on a regular basis.
Blitstein's article was referenced in an online relationships forum about the problem. Several posters talked about the challenge of finding couple-friends dynamics in which both spouses like and get along with both spouses.
Insight comes via a 2012 New York Times article, "Friends of a Certain Age: Why Is It Hard to Make Friends Over 30?" by Alex Williams, who cites a psychology professor who observed that people tend to interact with fewer people as they get older, but grow closer to existing friends. And "as external conditions change, it becomes tougher to meet the three conditions that sociologists since the 1950s have considered crucial to making close friends: proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other," Williams wrote, adding elsewhere that "differences in professional status and income also complicate matters." (Yeah, I guess I can see why it'd be awkward for married struggling journalists to carry on a friendship with married doctors.)
Perhaps there are advantages to being a lone couple. The more cynical among us may well point out the countless books, movies and real-life scenarios in which two couples were friends and a spouse from one couple cheated with a spouse from the other. And there's another recipe for trouble: "I am at the point where a number of friends are getting divorced and we're forced to take sides," reads a response to a blog post about the couple-friends problem. Yikes.
But everything has disadvantages -- and I think the worst thing we can do in our quest to find couple-pals is give up. So we'll keep showing ourselves friendly in hopes of someday successfully matchmaking for two.
Why don't we get together with our husbands for dinner and an email?
hwilliams@arkansasonline.com
Style on 07/13/2014