Friend brought her husband to long planned dinner with old friends 🙄

[Wofflewaffle]

Went to have dinner out with three old friends tonight. It’s taken a year to find a date that we are all available, we’ve all got lots to talk about, really looking forward to it and… 30 minutes before we are due to meet one of them texts to say that her husband will be joining us!!!

she’s got form for this. I’ve often gone to meet with her and she’ll have brought some random acquaintance along with her. Or I go to her house for tea, and her neighbour will be there too. Or we’ll go en famille to her country house - and when we get there another family / some cousins / the neighbours will also have been invited.

i hate it. It changes the dynamic completely. Tonight it changed from the expected girly catch up to talking about very bland stuff, because we didn’t want to get into anything personal with her husband there. I didn’t make a fuss at the time, and he left after we’d eaten so we had about an hour of proper catching up, but I feel very cheated. I didn’t say anything at the time because her husband is also friends with us, as a family friend. He’s perfectly nice - just not tonight!

i just can’t understand why she thinks this is ok - nor why her husband would even want to join us!

“Ladies?”

I've just been reminded of an incident, I didn't invite XH, and it was a Lush event in a pub, special cocktails, face masks and hand massages, XH turned up, he drank a lot and was also very jealous, one of the staff was giving a guy who was just in the pub, not there for the event, a hand massage, XH just screamed for hours about how there were men there. He finally left, and I just wanted the floor to swallow me up.

Yep. People like this see themselves as a kind of social facilitator, guiding and moulding the rest of us like Greek gods with mortals, as if we wouldn't be able to make the best of our opportunities without their benign supervision. The non-romance version of the perpetual matchmaker.

The type to arrange the seating plan at their wedding so that everyone's sat with strangers.

Or hold a gathering with deliberately not enough chairs as "that's how you get everybody to mingle".

Infuriating.

I go out with a couple of groups of female friends, one is old school friends, the is other mum friends I met on mat leave (19 years ago).

It might amaze you to hear but more often than not genitals of any kind never get a single mention! We mostly talk about stuff like our work, emotions, kids, tv, politics, food and all sorts of random things.

It also might amaze you that we include the husbands sometimes when we get together and all have other friends of both sexes outside of these groups, too.

Who knew, you can really value ladies-only friendship groups (which rarely mention our sex lives) in addition to other friendships which also include men. Mind blown!

This is stunningly unempathetic to me.

DS1 when he was around 10 would have loved to entertain the little ones for free, DS2's 9th birthday was in the local park and DS1 spent the entire afternoon/evening playing with various little siblings. Even now at 18 he prefers the company of 11/12 year olds or older adults.

Would you have been happy for someone else to unilaterally, without knowing he enjoyed this, decide that he'd be doing that daily whether he liked it or not? Would this have been absolutely fine with you and him if he hadn't enjoyed it?

Would you have been happy, when he was a toddler, to be told your toddler was going to be taken out of your sight and earshot for a couple of hours by a pre teen you didn't know and who's parents you'd only just met, without this being something you'd asked for?

After I was widowed I was glad I hadn't only socialised as a couple. I'd always met up with female friends, which I could just carry on with

Just before covid I was meant to be meeting up with an old friend. It was a 90 minute drive for both of us to meet at a NT place for lunch.
We’d had a bit of a fuss as initially she wanted me to come to hers for lunch with DH and DC, but it would be a 6 hour round trip!
so we compromised meeting half way. The day before we were due to meet she cancelled as her husband felt ‘left out’ and wanted to come but couldn’t get the day off work. I have met him a few times but he’s not my friend. I hadn’t seen her for over 10 years so I did want to catch up with her!
we’ve never met up. I now haven’t seen her for over 18 years and doubt I ever will now.

The day before we were due to meet she cancelled as her husband felt ‘left out’ and wanted to come but couldn’t get the day off work.

Good grief, this is one of the most pathetic things ive ever heard in my life. How can you find someone remotely attractive who says this? 🤮

Yeah this would annoy me but to be honest I would be surprised if any of my friend’s husbands rocked up. I guess all you can do is have a quiet word with her and maybe say “this time only us but next time we’ll do with husbands” (especially if your friends all thought the same) and try and meet up more than once a year to enable different group dynamics.

I’ve invited my husband when things haven’t been “just the girls” but he himself will say “you’ll have a better catch up without us men”.

I know you have said you think it’s her trying to include the husband and maybe it is that scenario but I’ve known the same dynamic in terms of older western man and younger Asian woman where the man is very controlling and doesn’t like his wife doing anything for herself.

No, and that wasn't my point. I'm saying that he would have loved it. No one asked him to supervise younger children, he didn't consider himself to be supervising them, he was just playing with them.

No one could have made him if he hadn't wanted to, he was undiagnosed autistic at the time and would have had a meltdown if anyone had tried.

When he was a toddler, he would have always been with me, DH or a trusted adult.

I'm not disagreeing with your point at all.

My DH would have liked to see her, he knows her better than I knew her DH. He would understand we had a lot to catch up on though. There are always other occasions for people to get together.

This situation would not hppen, no parent with their wits about them would countenance a teenaged boy wandering off looking after or playing with
their little one/s, especially a young man of 18.
I also doubt any responsible parent would actully request this!

He was 13 at the time, he's 18 now. Also it was in a very small park where we all were, he was just playing on the hill right next to us.

I’d find this really annoying too, although I’d also be a bit questioning about whether she has much of a choice about whether he comes or not ie he’s controlling.

I have a friend who always brings her almost adult daughter along when we meet, she’s nice, we get on, but it does change the dynamic a bit