It is not common and if you experience this then you are: bad at setting your own boundaries, bad at mate selection, or bad at friend selection.
Men are not victims here. Have a hard look at why you think this and fix the problem.
Men are not victims here. Have a hard look at why you think this and fix the problem.
I’m not sure if I’d describe it as common, but having a partner who either directly, or passively aggressively, undermines your ability to maintain external friendships is a very real phenomenon.
It’s certainly not a healthy pattern, but it’s also pretty understandable. Relationships of all sorts need care and feeding. Sometimes intimate partner priorities push out friendships.
Different people experience this as more or less of a tragedy.
in my experience in the US couples tend to basically turn into a military style cornered unit with an us vs the world attitude as soon as children come, where the focus becomes some mix of family:work to the exclusion of all other activities, to include hobbies, fitness, eating right, etc. i hear jokes about "date night" as if that's somehow abnormal, so it seems people have to move mountains just to get dinner together.
i wonder if in the US there just isn't any sort of community setup so couples feel like any energy shared outside that is somehow hostile to their survival, e.g., you hanging out with your friends means you're not "all in" on your family or something.
it could also be a signaling thing, e.g. if you signal you don't have time for friends, perhaps the world views you as really virtuous and family oriented.
It’s hard to explain the vibe, but it’s there.
There have been all sort of explanations offered from the Church promoting the nuclear family to reduce the power of extended family/clans to the black plague creating a housing surplus in England.
In college, it was easy for me to maintain a lot of close knit relationships. No one was any farther than a 20 minute walk, usually half that, which made drinking pretty painless too. Bars, movies, food was all in between, and cheap.
Now I live in LA for grad school, and getting people in my classes to hang out on the weekends is like pulling teeth. As dense as the city is, it basically functions as one massive suburb from back east. Everyone is at least 20 minutes by car in every direction, there is zero parking, one of the worst bike lane networks in the U.S., and rarely a transit line. There's also the costs of doing literally anything. A night out could be $30 in ubers alone, and it doesn't help that I've yet to find a well drink in LA for under $10 that wasn't watered down. It's a recipe for apathy. At least hiking is free.
Indeed, many men are bad at some of those things. Attraction to a partner can be such a powerful motivation that one rushes to establish the relationship without thinking or caring about the effect it will have on one's social life. Then, once one is already married, there is a fairly widespread expectation that one’s social life has to acquiesce to what the spouse is comfortable with, and attempting to "set boundaries" in this matter would be inappropriate.
> Men are not victims here.
My post above concerned men because the linked article is about men, but it is people in general who are the victims here. I suspect that many women face the same problem in being unable to freely interact with their friends due to husbands who don't like their friend group.
In most cases, both parties will contribute to the problem but someone needs to lead themselves and their partner out of the complementary neurosis and you do that by taking responsibility for your contribution then setting boundaries and working compassionately with the other person/people.
I don't even think it's people generally who are victims. I don't like victim mentality because it robs "the victim" of agency.
It is not necessarily a case of the husband considering his wife the enemy. It may well be that the husband is content enough with his marriage and parenthood that he simply accepts the wife’s dislike of having his friends over and other obstacles to socializing. Rather, the group that suffers from this circumstance is his former friends.
If you remain single, a noticeable part of the gradual loss of old friends in adulthood – as mentioned by others in this discussion – is your longtime friends getting married and then no longer being unable to maintain the friendship from their end. Obviously you cannot dictate to your friend and your friend’s spouse, and the onus is on you to look elsewhere for other sources of a social life, but it is natural to mourn the loss of a longtime friendship.