Spinoff: Asking your SO to stop seeing a friend. What's your view?

[Anonymous]

So there's been several threads all with a variation on the girlfriend not liking the female friend if her boyfriend/husband. Generally speaking the consensus is ( rightly) the girlfriend need to get over it or move on.

I'm curious if in your opinion there's ever a scenario where it is okay for someone to ask their SO to stop seeing a friend?

[Anonymous]

Yes, absolutely OK. A rock solid marriage requires that the couple out their relationship first. If it's a deal-breaker for one of them to ask the other to end a friendship with someone if the opposite sex, thats a serious problem.

That said, context is everything. If there is a long pattern of one spouse being controlling and isolating the other spouse, that's a different story.

I say this as someone who divorced after 17 tears of marriage. My ex used to always talk about his admin assistant in neutral to slightly demeaning ways (not terribly bright, unmotivated, etc). I cared naught for 6-7 years. He started having to travel a lot... Like 25% of the time, and she usually accompanied. He started talking about her way more often, and in more glowing terms. One night I looked him in the eye and said "whatever this is with your secretary, you need to dial it back." His response was that our marriage wouldn't work if he couldn't be friends with the secretary.

I kicked him out of the house right then and there. No woman takes priority over me with my husband, except maaaaaybe his mom.

They had a short lived affair before her husband turned him in and he was demoted and she was sent to a different department. Shockingly cliche.

[Anonymous]

Details or your post is pointless

[Anonymous]

I guess it’s OK if you have low or no expectations. Or if you’re willing to walk away if they say no.

My DH has a female friend he started talking a lot about maybe 8 months ago or so. Ok, whatever, he’s always had a lot of female friends, it’s kind of annoying, but he’s not out spending time with them or anything — he’s at home with me and our two small children.

But then he started going to happy hours (don’t know with whom). And he was clearly texting with her outside of work hours. It became apparent that they were having an intense relationship of some type. I told him this is causing problems, they clearly are getting too close, he’s crossing a line, knock it the F off. We were having other serious problems at the same time too (imagine that). He didn’t agree to it, but he stopped talking to me about her for the most part. He changed jobs. I couldn’t tell how much he was communicating with her but it either was less or just less obvious.

I don’t know what happened, but recently they’ve seemingly fizzled out. Things are better with us. I don’t have to hunt down and cut a B at the moment. Knowing how stubborn he is, I didn’t expect him to cut her off, but I did expect him to cut the crap or face mounting problems at home. We’ll see what happens. At this point I have no proof of anything and it’s not worth leaving over. But that could always change if things go sideways.

[Anonymous]

If the friend is causing trouble for the marriage/relationship or is hostile to the SO, yes, it's acceptable. For example, if the friend tells lies about or insults the wife (I'll use wife just for convenience), flirts with the husband, badmouths the wife to the husband or other friends, tries to convince the husband to divorce her, or otherwise tries to stir up trouble between the couple, then it's not unreasonable for the wife to ask her husband to stop spending time with this person.

Or if the spouse has good reason to be jealous of the other person, then it's fair to ask the other spouse not to see them.

[Anonymous]

Agreed - context matters. I have lots of male friends due to my job but they are just my friends and they are respectful of the fact that I'm married. My husband works more with men but had a female receptionist at his office who said and did inappropriate things to him and I asked him to cut it off with her and he did because he saw what I was saying. If any of my guy friends said or did something like that I'd have cut them off as well. So I think it's entirely possible to be good friends with someone of the opposite sex with no issue whatsoever, but I also think there can be valid reasons for a SO to ask you to stop seeing a friend of the opposite sex depending on how both parties are acting.

[Anonymous]

Op here. No current situation. I'm just asking generally if it's ever okay to ask an so to cutoff a friend.

[Anonymous]

Sure. I think the post about the DH who ran up $20k in credit card debt trying to keep up with his buddies is a great example. Also anything dangerous or illegal, eg, the buddies do drugs or DUI.

Usually, though, I think it's not necessary to actually tell your spouse to stop. My spouse had a college-era friend who had become a truly terrible adult human. I refused to hang out with this person or expose our kids to him, and I told DH as neutrally as I could that I didn't understand how decent people could enjoy being around this person. Then I let it drop. I honestly had no plans to bring it up again. DH got around to cutting him off, on his own, a month or so later.