How important do you think it is to surround yourself with couple friends that have good marriages? I once read an article regarding how couples tend to start mirroring relationships with other couple friends that you spend a lot of time with.

For example, we have two couple friends who happen to be our neighbors. We will do dinners and other activities with them. DH and I will also do solo activities with the wives or husbands. These two particular couples are very close and vacation together have every weekend meal together, etc. The wives are also the very best of friends and have a very co dependent relationship with each other.

DH and I have both come to the realization that they have the same complaints about each other especially coming from the wives. They both think their husbands are lazy, they don’t ever want to have sex with their husbands, they don’t allow them to discipline their own children. I'm the one that hears the majority of them while I am only with the ladies.

On Friday night we went to a fund raiser dinner with both couples. They choose not to sit next to each other at the table and even though one husband I’ll call him J requested the DJ play their wedding song his wife absolutely refused to dance with him. I was horrified for him. He was standing on the dance floor all alone just trying to get her to join him. J also won his wife something that she wanted from the silent auction and when he asked for a kiss as a thank you his wife’s BFF at the same time he went to kiss her jumped up and kissed her cheek. It was almost as though she was claiming his wife as her own. It was very odd and I guess you had to witness it yourself to understand.

My DH is one of those guys that people will often come to for advice or just to talk. I actually think he missed his calling and should have become a therapist. He is very calm but can be a straight shooter without coming across condescending. J came to DH yesterday afternoon and asked what he thought he was doing wrong in his relationship. J thinks that no matter what he does he can’t seem to make his wife happy. DH was honest with him and told him that there seems to be a third person in his marriage. DH invoked his man card privilege and didn't tell me any other part of the conversation but according to DH he just let J blow off some much needed steam and was there to have a beer with. Other husband S has made small comments to DH about his wife as well.

DH and I really like these couples individually and they are good people that would do almost anything for the people that they care about.

I know that every relationship has its issues and DH and I work hard to maintain our relationship and trust me it’s far from perfect. After talking to DH we decided that maybe we should start to expand our couple friends to people outside of our neighbors and have I have invited a friend and her husband from where I work to dinner on Friday. I don’t think DH and I would fall into this pattern but if you do ask DH he would say I never want to have sex either but at least he gets some weekly!