She’s Hanging Out With Other Guys And You’re Jealous — Here’s What To Do
The Dating Nerd is a shadowy figure whose whereabouts and identifying details remain unknown. What we do know is that he is really, really good at dating. He’s been on more dates than you can shake a lengthy bar tab at, and he’s here to help the average guy step his dating game up a notch — or several.
The Question
Hi Dating Nerd,
My girlfriend keeps hanging out with this one male friend. When we first started dating me she assured me that she didn’t see this guy that way and that he didn’t see her that way. It was nothing to worry about. Great, who cares? I thought. It was the honeymoon phase and nothing could bring me down. Fast forward eight months and they’re still hanging out once or twice a month, and you know what, by now it’s started to get to me. It just… it all seems sort of weird. I don’t want to believe that she’s cheating on me (in fact, I don’t believe that she’s cheating on me) but it does make me feel shitty and I don’t know that I trust this other guy’s intentions. I mean, what straight guy has a female friend that he doesn’t at least consider boning, right? What the hell do I do?
— Insecure About The Other Guy
The Answer
Hi Insecure,
Of all the uncomfortable things about being a dude — having your balls stuck to your leg, prostate cancer, etcetera — probably the most difficult is managing your stupid inner caveman. You know what I’m talking about. You’re a smart, refined person, but there’s this primitive voice inside you. The voice of a territorial, chest-beating idiot whose entire frontal cortex has been replaced with a big bag of testosterone. This is the inner voice who encourages all your worst behavior — leering for extended periods at every woman around you, bragging loudly about your achievements, and, more relevant here, being blindly, indiscriminately jealous, whether or not the situation warrants it.
We all know that, on some level, we get a little stressed out when our girlfriend is hanging out with a handsome guy. Your eyeball just starts to twitch a bit. You wonder if you could beat him to a bloody pulp, in a pinch. Basically you get territorial in a bad way. Your caveman brain is screaming at you — your caveman brain says you’re in trouble, and you should react immediately.
And you have to tell that part of your brain to shut up. Because, well, it’s entirely possible that you’re actually facing some sort of significant relationship situation here. Maybe she’s actually considering cheating on you, or is just becoming somewhat emotionally attached. But before you decide that, you need to use your judgement. Slow down. Actually think about the details. Recognize that, if your girlfriend doesn’t have a single feeling for this dude beyond friendship, you’re going to come off like an insecure douche if you tell her she should stop hanging out with him.
Think about it. Would you like it if your girlfriend hassled you about you hanging out with your female friends? Probably not, right? You would feel caged. Trapped. Resentful about the fact that you’re having to cater to your girlfriend’s childish neuroticism. After all, we’re not in medieval times. People have friends of all genders.
My recommendation, therefore, is that you don’t make a hard and fast rule about whether your girlfriend can or can’t hang out with any male friends. You have to go on a case by case basis. Your suspicions might be warranted. But, as a general rule, you should investigate suspicions, not trust them immediately. Sometimes smoke means fire, but sometimes smoke just means someone’s smoking a big fat doobie. Your instincts are worth listening to, but not worth immediately obeying. Really examine whether there are any signs that she has a major lady-boner for this guy, then, if you think she does, raise the subject.
Also, another caveat I should add here, which might be hard to take, but which is, unfortunately, true: having crushes when you’re in a romantic relationship is extremely normal. Unless you’re the two ugliest people in the world, who have luckily found each other, you’re both going to experience feelings of connection to other people before you die. Dealing with this is just one of the less fun parts of any monogamous relationship. Don’t throw a tantrum, don’t immediately run to the nearest online dating site.
So what does using your judgement look like? Don’t worry, it’s not particularly difficult — you’re probably pretty experienced in your girlfriend’s behavior, so you know what it looks like when she’s excited about somebody. Recall your first few dates, and the adorable look on her face when she saw you across the bar. Remember how your jokes always made her laugh, even when they weren’t funny at all. Maybe she was always sort of suppressing a smile — the corners of her lips were always tilting gently upwards.
Does any of this occur when your girlfriend gets a text from this dude? Does his presence generate a higher calibre of happiness than a brush with a dude friend usually does? Is she having a hard time keeping a straight face when she mentions him?
These are moderately important signs that there’s something going on. But the more serious question is whether she’s being shady about him. Does she say she’s hanging out with ‘a friend’ rather than saying his name? If you maybe suggest the three of you hang out together, is his schedule suddenly full?
If the answers to a bunch of these questions are ‘yeah’ or ‘kinda seems like it’, then you should probably talk to your girlfriend about this. By which I don’t mean threaten to kill the guy in question. Or bang your shoe on the table, call your girlfriend a liar, and move all your stuff out of the apartment. Calm down. Just be a man here: assertive, confident, reasonable. Just say, “Hey, I feel like we should talk about your friendship with [insert name of knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing idiot here].”
Actually, I’ve been in this situation before — on the other side. Yeah, I was “that guy.” My friendship with this girl Caroline was, well, a little too good. She kept telling me I smelled really nice, which is a slightly weird thing for an attached girl to say to an unattached guy. We’d be hanging out for coffee, but we’d end up eating at an excellent restaurant together, which is not exactly a normal platonic bro-down activity. My feelings about the situation were conflicted. While I enjoyed the attention, I knew the whole thing was a little suspicious. One of two things were going to happen: our friendship was going to end, or her relationship.
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And I have to give her boyfriend credit. He saw what was going on, and he approached it in the best way possible. One day, Caroline called me and said, “Hey, so, Steve said that maybe our friendship is getting a little too close for comfort. He trusted me when I said that nothing happened, but he’s not totally happy about us seeing each other. Would it be OK if we didn’t hang out solo from now on? Or at least for the near future?” That seemed good to me. I agreed to those terms.
Be like Steve. Go into this with your brain switched on and don’t freak out. This is a very common moment of monogamous stress. It’s not a big deal. It’ll only get out of hand if you let it.
