One of the awkward part of marriage... couple friends

Couple friends… those of you that are married know exactly what I am talking about. When you get married (or at least when I got married) you have to make a “friend transition”. I am guessing you need a bit of explanation. Single people and married people have some issues being friends, your lifestyles don’t mesh, single people got to bed after midnight, each night, eat top ramen 3 meals a day, and have money to buy things like…new clothes, video games etc. When the single friends start coming around odd questions come up like, “why are your friends so catty?” or “why don’t your friends know what a bar of soap is?” so you have to make a transition, if for no other reason than to stop that annoying conversation. You start to look for friends who are in a similar stage of life, people that are going through the same things you are, things like: no money, school, sleep deprivation, and living with a boy. If you are lucky you will find one of these couples, but finding them is the tough part. The best way I can describe it as is “dating”. Now don’t get me wrong I am not going down the 1950’s “key party” road, I’ll explain. When you meet a couple that you might be friends with you have to get to know each other, there is the awkwardness that comes with getting to know new people, you go out to dinner, play a game, watch a movie (all activities you did during your former single life), but since you are out of the single mindset you are horribly awful at these activities. You smile, and ask things like, “where are you from?, “what do you do for fun?” etc, you know the things you don’t actually care to know, but you are just hoping that these topics will fill the awkward silence. About halfway through the evening you can tell if these people are going to be your “couple friends”, or in 9 out 10 cases not. Inevitably you get home and someone has a comment that goes something like this, “did you see her hair? Yeah we cannot be friends with them?”, “wow could he have been any more obnoxious?”, “did you see him chewing?”, “I like him, but she was an idiot!”, and you cross them off the list and go back to being lonely bored married people. Occasionally you will find a couple that you both like, one that you can both tolerate, and that you are willing to see more than once, when that happens you are lucky, really, now there are 4 bored married people. You know those couples, you like the wife, and your husband likes the other husband, there is very little awkward silence, few painful silent dinners, and enough laughter to keep the whole thing worth it. So why I am writing about this? Well I would like to think that Brian and I have “couple friends”, they might disagree, which would be tragic, but we think we do. We went and saw them last night, and it was fantastic! It is wonderful to have friends that are worried about similar things (don’t worry someday we will catch up in the kid department), laugh at the same things, and are willing to just sit and relax and chat for no reason. I mean without these friends who would talk to us? Who would we laugh with about random things, like dogs eating cell phones, who would we go to Chilis with for chips and salsa (which we so need to do again soon, even if it is to go), and who would tell my husband that shooting bunnies is a great activity? So thank you Fords for putting up with us!