Is it hard for couples to make friends with other couples?

Kathy Deal (my co-author on Two Plus Two: Couples and their Couple Friendships) and I have thought about this for a long time. We led over 200 interviews with couples and over 100 interviews with individuals in couples (married or partnered for at least one year) to try and figure out how these couple friendships work.

Friendships with other couples are worth working on if that is your desire. They can lead to insights into relationships, raising children, taking care of older family members, and gaining health information. Social stimulation is good for people and people with friends tend to live longer, happier, and healthier lives, according to research. You also might see your spouse in a new light when out with others—hopefully shining such a light can strengthen your own relationship.

But...

What if your partner likes one person in the couple but not the other?

What if you don’t want to spend time with your wife’s roommate from college and her spouse but you know your wife wants to?

What about obligations you feel to someone who has done a good deed for you but around whose partner you feel uncomfortable?

How do you handle the conversation monopolizer in the other couple or the overly quiet person?

What if someone always flirts with your partner?

Let’s back up a bit here to consider what has to happen to make couple friendships easier to navigate.

1. Time is tough to figure out in a couple. We need alone time for ourselves, time with our friends without our partner, alone time with our partner, time with our family, and time with other couples. Balancing those competing needs takes communication. Unless you can figure out how your time and your spouse’s time are meted out, there may be a struggle when it is time to get together with another couple. So, the first step is to talk about how your time gets divvied up;
2. What do you want to do with the other couple? Kathy and I found that there were couples that just wanted to have fun with another couple (we called them "fun-sharing") and couples that wanted to do a deep emotional dive into life (we called them "emotion-sharing"). Couples need to figure out how they want to spend time with others—bowling and pizza because you need a break from the heavy stuff going on in your family or at work? Or cocktails and dinner at your house to talk about that heavy stuff going on with kids, work, or parents? Couples can usually discern among their friends who are the fun-sharers and who are the emotion-sharers, but you have to talk about it;
3. Do you want to make new friends? Or is your plate full? Or are you newly together and want to build a boundary around your relationship before you open it up to others? We found there are three types of couples: seekers (who are highly interested in adding friends), keepers (who have a full plate and are open to friends but are not looking to make them), and nesters (folks who are either introverts or have not spent a lot of years together and want to build their relationship). Talk about what kind of couple you are and recognize that you may not be on the same page as your partner—you may want to socialize more while your spouse prefers staying home and reading. Many couples compromise, where one spouse has to socialize a little more than is their preference and the other has to socialize a little less.

By answering these questions, you can begin to address the idiosyncratic couple that is sitting in front of you and weigh the plusses and minuses of hanging out with them. And if you cannot communicate well as a couple with each other, couples may not want to hang out with you.