Reply to Concerned about my wife's lack of desire to expand her social circle

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[quote=Anonymous]I'll start off by noting that both my wife and I would classify ourselves as introverts. I'm probably more introverted than her, but I'm more comfortable stepping outside my comfort zone than she is (if that makes sense).

In our mid-late 20's, we lived in DC, and we had a decent sized group of friends that we would hang out with every weekend, doing the typical going out to bars/dinner/house parties, etc. While we enjoyed city life, we knew that we'd move out to the suburbs to have kids. Also, my wife is close to her parents, and we knew that we wanted to live in the same area as them (like a 15-20 minute drive).

Eventually, as we reached our 30s, the dynamics of our respective friend groups began to change. Some moved out to the far-flung burbs of the DMV (or out of the area all together), while our friends that remained in the city seemed more into the drinking and partying scene, while we were starting to move away from it. This shift in our dynamic, along with changing jobs and getting ready to have kids, made us realize that we were ready to move out to the suburbs. In the spring of 2019, we moved; we intentionally picked a neighborhood that had a lot of young families, with the hope that it would help us reinvigorate our social life.

However, that didn't really happen. While there were young families on our block, most of them had older kids (between 4-10 or so), and we weren't able to really connect with them. In early 2020, we found out my wife was pregnant, which was exciting, as we hoped this would open new doors to our social life with being able to meet other new parents....of course, then Covid hit, which took away alot of opportunities for us to meet new people. Around the same time, my wife began to get disinterested in her group of friends. To sum it up, her friend group at the time was split between those who had kids, and those who didn't. She understandably had a hard time connecting with her friends who didn't have kids, and felt like her friends who did have kids were trying to live life as if they were still childless (ex. going out to bars). Her friends would invite her out, and more often than not, she'd say no, and stay at home. Because of this, a majority of our socializing since our daughter has been born has been with her parents and her sister.

Now that we're kind of out of the Covid fog, we've talked alot about making new friends. Our daughter goes to a pre-school that has lots of social events for parents in the evenings/weekends. We've gone a few times, and I've really enjoyed it; it feels really good to at least make baby steps towards building a social circle. However, every time I ask my wife about going to these events, she'll usually respond with "eh, I don't really want to, it's kind of awkward." It's frustrating because she will say from time to time that she wishes she had a close group of Mom friends, but now that there's as good of an opportunity to start to make those friendships as we've had since we moved to the suburbs, she doesn't seem to want to take advantage of it.

If you heard about this situation, you'd probably think it sounds like a textbook case of depression/anxiety, right? Well, a few days ago, my wife and I were talking, and she told me that she's felt that happiest she's ever been. I asked her why, and she said, "I don't have to spend time with my old group of friends, and I get to spend more time with my parents and sister."

So I guess I'm just frustrated that she doesn't want to expand her social circle. To be fair, she's very supportive of me making new friends/spending time with my current group of friends, but it sometimes feels like she'd be genuinely fine with her entire social circle consisting of her parents and her sister. And while her parents and sister are great to hang out with for sure, it's frustrating that she wants to make new friends, but doesn't want to step outside her comfort zone to do so. [/quote]

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