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This dynamic provides great comedic scope in TV series like Friends or Nora Ephron movies, but what about in real life? You love your other half, obviously. They’re great to be with, which is why you’re with them and why you have no intention of going anywhere soon. But the friends? Oh dear me, the friends.
We’re not talking downright offensive here. We’re not talking people who operate outside the norms of acceptable behaviour, via social taboos like sexism, racism or homophobia. No, we’re talking common or garden personal dislike here. Nothing more dramatic. Your perfectly nice partner has some friends who you personally cannot connect with at all. They are just so bloody over-intellectual and stuffy/under-intellectual and boorish/vaguely sneery and condescending - insert reasons to dislike here. But they mean the world to your partner, who has known them forever - long before you two were a couple.
“My husband had two friends, one male, one female, I just could not stomach,” says Susan, who is 38 and married to Peter, also 38. “They were just so patronising to me, all the time. After our daughter was born it became even more obvious. They were his old clubbing buddies who were still at it, and resented me because they saw me as someone who had stolen their friend and domesticated him, as though I had taken him hostage.
“My husband was blind to the fact that they spoke down to me. It made me feel isolated, especially when our daughter was a baby - as though I were a killjoy. Eventually their friendship rerouted itself naturally, as my husband gravitated more towards family life without me having to do anything drastic. But it was touch and go for about a year, when I wanted to ring them up and tell them to get lost, to stay out of our lives. Luckily I didn’t. He still sees them, but not as much, because his priorities have changed.”
Rather than being about personalities, disliking your partner’s friends can often be about displacement and a shift in hierarchy. When Lucy, 40, and Tim, 36, moved in together, it displaced his friendship with his best friend. The best friend detested Lucy from the start - and while she was initially bewildered, she realised after a while that it was not actually personal. She was merely the woman who had stolen his best friend - she could have been anyone.
Once she realised that this was the case - why the best friend was so cold to her, and never bothered talking to her unless he had to - she stepped back and gave the men’s friendship space to continue as before. When the best friend eventually sussed that Lucy was not a threat, he relaxed around her. This does not mean that they hang out in a happy gang of three, however. Tim sees his best friend regularly, on his own. This works for everyone, because Lucy basically thinks his best friend is a bit of an idiot, and rude to boot.
“It took a while to accept that this bloke is Tim’s oldest friend from school, that they are like brothers, and that Tim was never going to drop him in deference to me,” she says.
“But the guy is not someone I would bother with, so I just don’t go there. Literally. That way, everyone is happy. Tim doesn’t mind - he just doesn’t want any aggro.”
“It’s quite normal to not to like every friend your partner has and they may not like all of yours either,” says relationship counsellor Lisa O’Hara of Relationships Ireland.
“However, for some people they may see friends as eating into time and affection that they believe should be invested in the relationship and it may bring up an underlying anxiety that can cause problems. On the other hand it is good to have friends as your partner cannot meet all your needs and it will place too much pressure on the relationship, which can be suffocating.”
But your friends liking your partner and vice versa is really important, especially at the beginning of a relationship. If your friends dislike him or her, you question your choices, asking yourself what they can see that you don’t.
But should you really be thinking this way? After all, nobody from the outside knows what a relationship looks like on the inside. But unless you relocate to a desert island together, it’s unlikely you will be operating solely as a couple.
I lost a friendship in my twenties when a friend’s partner took exception to me - I thought my friend would choose me, as she knew me longer than her new partner, but she didn’t. I haven’t seen her since. Ouch.
Think of your partner’s friends as you would an arranged marriage. By falling in love with your partner, you have inherited a group of people who are going to be in your life but whom you would not necessarily have chosen as friends yourself. Over time, with an open mind and good social skills, you may come to like them, value them, enjoy their company, or at least learn to tolerate them.
“When I first met Siobhan, I could not stand her friends,” says Liam. “As a group I found them insufferable. They were so raucous, and personal, and nosey. Especially one of them. I just couldn’t stand her at all.”
This might sound like a car crash in motion, but Liam and Siobhan, both in their 20s, worked it out. Liam told Siobhan that he felt really uncomfortable around her friends when they were in a group - he readily admits he is not as open as a group of emotionally articulate women - so he was given a get-out-ofjail-free card when the friends were meeting up en masse.
Instead he got to know them one-by-one over the years, and built up a relationship with them as individuals. The friend he really disliked he still does, but with the others, he gets along fine. He just avoids them when they are in a group around their house, which Siobhan says they all prefer as well, as the presence of a male interrupts the all-female flow.
“We live and let live,” Liam says. “She’s happy after she’s seen her friends, and that has a knock-on effect on us being happy. And she has no interest in going out with my friends - she’d be bored stiff. I can see that. So we have our separate nights, then come back and tell each other how we got on. It works.”
Your partner’s friends are really important to them, no matter what you think of them.
Don’t slag them off to your partner - save that for your own friends, if you must. Be tolerant, while maintaining good boundaries - and remember, there’s room for everyone in our lives.
¦ Imagine them as you would tricky in-laws, and apply the same good manners
¦ Be as nice as you can when you are with them, treat them as you would like to be treated
¦ Talk to someone outside the relationship about how you feel and avoid being too vocal to your partner about it
¦ Give yourself time to get to know them before you decide if you really don’t like them
¦ Have firm boundaries around the time you have to spend with them but don’t stand in the way of your partner’s relationship or make them choose between you.
¦ Your friends are vital to your wellbeing, as you are to theirs
¦ They provide a safe place to talk, to share, to listen
¦ They have your best interests at heart, as you do theirs
¦ They don’t have a sexual agenda
¦ They will be there before, during and after your relationship
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