Married Men

Steal from them.

It's happening with my friends, too. Loathesome. They act like their dads. Ball and chain blah blah battleax blah blah oh women are such bitches blah blah. Someone wanna stick a hole in my head?

I have dealt with this by sitting quietly and not saying a damn thing, lest I blow my cover and offend those around me. ("Yes, I enjoy hanging out with women! Is that so wrong? Hey, put down that golf club.") If that fails, get drunk. If THAT fails, make excuses (but you already have that down, Tom).

I confess, it's nice to go out with the guys / a guy and kvetch about women IN SPECIFIC INSTANCES. When said guy/s start making base generalizations about womenkind, I sigh and slide down in my chair, agreeing with their biased silliness just to avoid the wasted effort of defending the other, more generous viewpoint (that, you know, women are just as multi-faceted and diverse as us guys, asshole - and get your hand out of your pants, dickwad) (and, yes, you ARE going bald, so stop hiding it).

Hmm, good question Tom. I have no answers for you as I'm largely unsocial *and* inarticulate. I will commiserate though. I hate those stereotypes and the way people fall into them e.g. get married men/women together and all they do is bitch about the other half. Like the fruity wine commercials where women sit around talking about what insufferable children their men are. arggh!

a joke I read today: I'm currently running the latest version of GirlFriend and I've been having some problems lately. I've been running the same version of DrinkingBuddies 1.0 forever as my primary application, and all the GirlFriend releases I've tried have always conflicted with it. I hear that DrinkingBuddies won't crash if GirlFriend is run in background mode and the sound is turned off. But I'm embarrassed to say I can't find the switch to turn the sound off. I just run them separately, and it works okay. Girlfriend also seems to have a problem co-existing with my Golf program, often trying to abort Golf with some sort of timing incompatibility. I probably should have stayed with GirlFriend 1.0, but I thought I might see better performance from GirlFriend 2.0. After months of conflicts and other problems, I consulted a friend who has had experience with GirlFriend 2.0. He said I probably didn't have enough cache to run GirlFriend 2.0, and eventually it would require a Token Ring to run properly. He was right - as soon as I purged my cache, it uninstalled itself. Shortly after that, I installed GirlFriend 3.0 beta. All the bugs were supposed to be gone, but the first time I used it, it gave me a virus anyway. I had to clean out my whole system and shutdown for a while. I very cautiously upgraded to GirlFriend 4.0. This time I used a SCSI probe first and also installed a virus protection program. It worked okay for a while until I discovered that GirlFriend 1.0 was still in my system. I tried running GirlFriend 1.0 again with GirlFriend 4.0 still installed, but GirlFriend 4.0 has a feature I didn't know about that automatically senses the presence of any other version of GirlFriend and communicates with it in some way, which results in the immediate removal of both versions. The version I have now works pretty well, but there are still some problems. Like all versions of GirlFriend, it is in some obscure language that I can't understand, much less reprogram. Frankly I think there is too much attention paid to the look and feel rather than the desired functionality. Also, to get the best connections with your hardware, you usually have to use gold-plated contacts. And I've never liked how GirlFriend was totally ''object-oriented.'' A year ago, a friend of mine upgraded his version of GirlFriend to GirlFriendPlus 1.0, which is a Terminate and Stay Resident version of GirlFriend. He discovered that GirlFriendPlus 1.0 expires within a year if you don't upgrade to Fiancee 1.0. So he did, but soon after that, he had to upgrade to Wife 1.0, which he describes as a huge resource hog. It has taken up all his space, so he can't load anything else. One of the primary reasons he decided to go with Wife 1.0 was because it came bundled with FreeSexPlus. Well, it turns out the resource allocation module of Wife 1.0 sometimes prohibits access to FreeSexPlus, particularly the new Plug-Ins he wanted to try. On top of that, Wife 1.0 must be running on a well warmed-up system before he can do anything. Although he did not ask for it, Wife 1.0 came with MotherInLaw, which has an automatic pop-up feature he can't turn off. I told him to try installing Mistress 1.0, but he said he heard if you try to run it without first uninstalling Wife 1.0, Wife 1.0 will delete MSMoney files before doing the uninstall itself. Then Mistress 1.0 won't install anyway because of insufficient resources.

Part of the problem with having female friends when you're married is that people sometimes assume you're seeking female company because there's something wrong at home. It's like putting on a wedding band automatically means that you should never again enjoy talking to a woman unless your wife is in the room. I fucking hate that.

thats also the troiuble with fucking the female freinds

The problem with having female friends is that females are so fucking stupid. Oh wait, men are equally stupid if not stupider. Sorry, I've had a really shit day, I've just been interrogated by the cops because the fuckwits at Sainsbury's thought I was using a stolen credit card. For £3.06 worth of groceries, yeah right. Assholes.

I never take credit card$ for less than a fiver at my shop.

I am a "married man", I don't play golf. I am not at all like tom's knobs-in-collective colleagues. Actually I think women are better than men. Before marriage /long term relationship I did have female friends, but, well, I'm sure U can work it out, yes? It just doesn't work anymore afterwards in my experience. Even being in bands w/female musicians can be problematic. I don't have a problem w'jill having male friends...but....she hasn't got any. Clearly complex/problematical etc, and a shame IMO.

I've been married almost three years and I don't think my social habits or the gender balance of my social circle has changed much, if at all. Aside from all the chums who know us both, I have female friends that aren't that close to Pam, and she has male friends that I don't really know that well. There are also male friends of mine who I see more of by myself than with Pam, and Pam has her girlfriends with whom I'm not so pally.

Funnily enough, while I do recognize the lads-playing-away phenomenon that Tom describes, when the spouses really are a long way away (as was the case when I was staying in a hostel while doing contract work in Cumbria; I was single but practically all of my colleagues were attached), and are only seen at weekends, there's a much more wistful edge to the banter. They miss 'em really. Aw.

(Roughly)What Norm and Michael said. Those 'colleaugues' of yours were wankers BEFORE they got married, Tom. And they still are.

A new threat looms - go-karting and then the dog track. Mind you this is better than golf, I've nothing against the dog track.

Weren't the words 'golf driving range' enough warning for you?

I believe the world is full of 'em.

I think people, when they get together in groups in an 'artificial' situation like a work do, (maybe they would NEVER socialise like this together unless work told them to), they play up to the *expectations* of how other people think they should behave. So each individual encourages each other to play up to the blokey married man thing, and because they're all behaving that way, no single individual has the courage to say 'sorry, but isn't this all a load of bollocks?' - (or words to that effect ;-)).

Do the go-karting Tom. It's ace and you can crash into them.

IMO a majority of men socialising in groups rapidly develop that insufferable all-lads-together-phwor-look-at-tits-on-that mentality whether married or not? I have too many male acquaintances whose company 1-to-1 can be quite agreeable but put them in a group + out comes this horrible macho competitive edge, power-games, naff sexism etc.

I told you Magnus was incorrigible!

Same experience as Stevo. A majority of the blokes I've worked with are like that. Great by themsleves, but rather too laddish when in groups without women.

I'd suggest Tom, you marry someone you really like. Or a golfer.

Being married is great, I can't recommend it highly enough. I am reminded of the scene in 'Anna Karenina' where what's his name is going to get married and his laddish mates tease him because he won't be allowed to go bear hunting any more and he can't think of anything more delightful than not being allowed to go bear hunting. Substitute 'paintballing' for 'bear hunting' and Bob's your uncle.

Mike, I didn't know you were married. We must get together for a PHWOOOAR session some time, providing we can get permission, of course. Perhaps better wait for full moon so they'll be busy, eh?

Peter Miller is my favorite poster today.

Perhaps many of these men aren't happy in their marriages -- or at least still want to have sex with women who aren't their wives -- but don't actually want to leave, so they avoid 1-on-1 female companionship, but still blow off some sexual steam by collectively ogling, etc., since no single one of them will likely have sex with a particular object of desire, and the group makes the experience collective and shared (and thus it feels "real" in a way that solitary fantasies don't) and gives them an outlet for frustrations, but also keeps each of them in check?

Phil should win an award for longest run-on sentenance.

I was pretty pleased with myself for fitting it all into one. Not bad, no? Though I've surely roused the ghosts of angry English teachers past and present.

(also samantha gets half the award for the way she spells "sentence")

mark s: :P