Find Yourself in the Thick of It...

"Martha My Dear" (not the Col Mustard version) just came on Shuffle, reminding me that I'm (again) a few days behind.

Frances, I've been thinking about your post.

I experience a phenomenon similar to yours, but from a different perspective. My male friends do their bonding largely without my participation: going to baseball games, meeting weekly for dominos, joining bowling teams, or just going out and drinking all nite. More significant: the 'boys' in my group do these activities (and the e-mails, phone calls to make plans etc.) without the 'girls.' If it's a 'couples' thing, Aubrey & I will always be invited, or if it's something like a movie or karaoke, I'll get invited (and Aubrey too), but if it's a 'trad' guy thing as above, I almost always won't even know about it... I may get looped in on an e-mail chain if, say, a music-related question happens to come up - then I'll discover from the chain that the reason they’re asking me which album some Van Halen song was on was because they heard it during halftime at a Sonics game the other night or whatnot.

Anyway, I don’t feel 'left out' by any means. It's just that I don't like sports/games, they all know I don't like sports/games, and so (over time) they've learned that I'll say no to the invitations anyway.

The kicker - and where it relates to your point - is that sometimes the girls will all get together elsewhere at the same time, in 'response' to the boys nights out. And they'll say to me something like "yah, you're stuck with us because we weren't ALLOWED to go." Not allowed. Seriously. While I don't care that these activities happen without me, a lot of the girlfriends/wives DO care, and get fairly upset and hurt feelings about it.

As I think about it, age and cohab-status seem to be the biggest factors. Back when everyone's young-n-single (your Twin Cities days?), boys and girls wanted to hang out together, in part to hook up and date. Not too long ago, these very same boys I know planned their evenings around getting as large a group together, boys and girls, to hang out. More evidence of this is the way that those few friends in the group (male and female) who are still single complain that we don’t all ‘go out’ the way we used to.

So now that most of these people are married, the boys sometimes wanna hang out with the boys. They send each other boy-only e-mails even if they are also friends with the boys’ sig-others, and they plan activities that are boys-only. You mentioned the need for occasional ‘away from the sig-other’ time, and I also think that’s part of it. So I also wonder if it feels ‘safer’ – that once in a relationship, boys hang out with boys because mixed groups may be more likely to have unattached girls which symbolizes potential trouble? I don’t know – I’m less sure about the reasons/causes, but what you described and what I experience here are similar enough to make me think something cultural (not geographic) is at work. It seems clear that boys-only activities fill some sort of role, at least for your friends and mine.

What kind of role? Again, I’m not sure, but I did recently have an uncomfortable possible glimpse: last month I was at a bachelor party for one of my friends, and it was actually the first 'boys only' event I've ever attended with this group. I was straight-up SHOCKED at the change in behavior of these people I've known for years: everyone called each other 'faggot,' there were lots of wayyyy off-color jokes and insults that would make Gaston’s online bridge partners blush, and, worse, rude treatment of restaurant/bar staff where the party was taking place. It could have been the particular context – the pending, symbol-heavy wedding – that guided this behavior, but I couldn’t help but think ‘so THIS is what happens during those bowling tournaments.’ I also thought “no wonder they want the ladies to stay away.”

Frances – on the other side, do you have any ‘girl-only’ activities with friends? There was a group here at work that was all about that: creating a ‘Ladies Who Lunch’ e-mail group, going out to shows together, etc. It would be interesting to compare these activities and think about the roles they might serve and add that to this discussion…