Committed: The Ties that Bond
with Angella Dykstra
I'm a mom of three, a professional accountant, and an amateur photographer and writer. I am not a marriage expert. But my husband and I take "Til death do us part" seriously, and here I'll be sharing how we keep our marriage strong while we both do that insane work-life juggle.
Check out my Work It, Mom! profile and my blog, Dutch Blitz.
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I was chatting with an acquaintance who works at a local store and we got to talking about the holidays and what we’ve been up to. She mentioned that she’d gone out to dinner with friends the night before and had stayed out way to late talking and was tired. Then she joked that she felt a bit weird because she was the only single girl at a table with three couples. I assured her that if they were good friends, nobody else probably even noticed.
As for me, I do have friends who are single or divorced and I haven’t found that it makes our friendship any “different”, just because they don’t have a husband and/or kids. It’s just like I get along with my married girlfriends even though they have different careers and hobbies than I do. My closest single girlfriends do not live nearby, sadly, but when I do get the chance to see them and spend time with them, I appreciate it so much. And I appreciate the great girlfriends who live here in town, who just happen to all be married.
How about you? Do you have single friends that you’re close to? Or do you find yourself hanging out mostly with other couples?
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One of my closest girlfriends is 3 years older than me (mid-40s) and she’s never married, no kids. I’ve known her since I got married (kids came 5 years later for us). She is like a surrogate aunt to my kids, who’ve known her all their lives (she visited me in the hospital within hours of both their births….). I don’t find that we hang out with mostly married couples - our friends span all the demographics. I hang out with girlfriends, married and/or single (hum, no divorced..?!), and husband has a few friends who are all married. I also have a few friends who are men - one is married, one is divorced and has a girlfriend, one is gay and in a long-term relatoinship and lives with his partner. Perhaps this is more a reflection fo the big city we live in and the diversity that comes with that though?
Angela | January 17th, 2012 at 1:20 pm
I actually have a lot of single male friends - because my husband works in IT and there are a lot of single guys in IT and we have some of them over for dinner. A lot. Ditto the guy who rents our basement suite. He is a single man who is a college friend of my husbands. We feed him at least two or three nights a week and the two men go off to the gym together every day. There are single guys here in our home more evenings than not. We hang out and have fun. We play a lot of board games and video games. I give them lots of cookies. There is no real awkwardness.
On the other hand, at our church I feel like a single girl, since my husband never comes along, and isn’t really involved in anything. I’m friends with all the ladies, married or not, and have made friends with some of the husbands of my friends, but as there are a lot of young families there are a lot of groups and events geared towards couples. I often feel sort of awkward, a little out of place, even though I’ve been attending there for over a decade, work there, and am involved with so many ministries. It’s just kind of bizarre.
Danica | January 21st, 2012 at 8:25 pm