Another Man's View
by David Kennedy

I must admit that I was a little lost at how to respond to that. This couple had been very genuine in their efforts to make me feel welcome into their social circle - due in no small part, I'm sure, to my fiancé. And they are very nice, personable, loving, friendly, fun and funny people; two people whom I truly enjoy being around and doing things with...

...But do I consider them my friends?

Rather than inform my fiancé of this minor little internal turmoil and invite the conflict with her that I am sure would have followed (and knowing that there was a right answer to that query and knowing what that answer was), I just immediately responded to my fiancé, "Of course they are, Honey."

Her query aside, it still begs the question: Are this couple friends of mine? It has occurred to me that most people would not agonize over what would seem to be a simple matter. But I would venture to guess that most people's idea of a friend is somewhat more simplistic than mine. People generally tend to think that if you travel in the same circles, enjoy the same things, have the same interests - and hell, you aren't enemies - then you must be friends. And all of this applies to this couple whom I know through my fiancé.
For most of my life I've been a loner, so I tend to have a narrower definition of what a friend is given my very tight nucleus of friends. But that aside, friends that are brought into a relationship by either partner tend to be friends with a caveat. That is, her friends are your friends because you are dating or married to her. If your relationship with her ended tomorrow, her friends are no longer your friends... and vice-versa.

A rather interesting social minefield, if you will, but no less accurate. I'm divorced, so as a one-time loser I have been a soldier on this social battlefront. When my ex-wife and I began dating, her friends made me a part of their social life. I was invited to barbecues, holiday gatherings, even church. When we got married we socialized with her friends as a couple. I was even invited to her friends' family functions such as weddings and reunions. Wow! I was treated like I was part of her friend's families. And once I had the benefit of a considerable amount of time with both my ex-wife (almost ten years) and her friends, I began to believe that I really was their friend and that they were my friends. Hell, even when I needed help - such as a place to stay when we were in transition from one coast to the other, or we were in need of money, or my ex-wife went into the hospital - they were there for me. I thought her friends - my friends - and I were as thick as thieves. But once my ex-wife and I separated it was as if they vanished into thin air. I tried to contact them but they never returned my phone calls. I never saw them or heard from them again. It's not as if I wasn't going through a tough enough time. Now here were these people whom I had counted on, broke bread with, and opened up to for close to ten years abandoning me like a cancer. Clearly these people had never really been my friends.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised, though. I'd like to imagine that my friends whom I had brought into my relationship with my ex-wife were more civilized, but I quickly found out that they weren't much better. One friend, who just so happened to be the best man at our wedding, asked my if he should break off all contact with her. I told him he could do what he wanted and that it didn't matter to me, but he broke off contact nonetheless. A couple of other friends, I guess in an attempt to console me, told me that they never liked my ex-wife and that they were glad they would never have to see her again.
What I found surprising about my situation was that I had figured that the passing of time would solidify my ex-wife's friends as my friends. I was wrong. It had always been a conditional friendship.

But I've come to learn that even as a friend, however you try to stay outside the fray that is the continuous battleground that a relationship between two people you consider friends is, there may come a time when they expect you to choose sides. One couple whose relationship dissolved like paper in a bowl of acid put me in just such a position. The husband needed a place to stay, so I opened up my home to him. When the wife started charging him with things ranging from sexual assault to abandonment to spousal abuse, I got caught in the middle. Even as I tried to stay out of it the two pulled me right into the mix. The husband had me serve his wife with divorce papers, and the wife called me as a witness in the divorce proceedings.

Maybe I'm just more attuned to this because since my divorce I've been a witness to a number of my friends getting divorced. Another friend of mine separated from his wife and not only kept the friends he brought into the relationship but inherited most of the friends his ex-wife brought into it. It seems that she was not a very likable person, and the longer her friends knew her the less they liked her. Conversely, the husband is a well-liked person capable of winning over the most abstinent personality. This couple had been married for almost fifteen years. In my case the choice between husband and wife was easy: among the many issues the wife had was a phantom problem she had with me (which to this day I have no idea what it was, she never voiced before and concealed very well given the number of times I socialized with her). Still, that this woman had so few remaining friends when it was over was somewhat surprising.

What I find so appalling about any of this is that anybody whom I consider a friend is a friend unconditionally. No caveats or circumstances. Which makes the inquiry my new fiancé made that much more perplexing. I like my fiancé's friends and I believe they truly do like me as an individual, and I want to consider them my own friends, also. I just wonder if this is more of an "our" friends kind of relationship than a "my" friends kind of relationship. I wonder if, given what has happened to me in the past and what has happened to many of my other friends, they would continue a sociable relationship with me if my fiancé and I were to break up. I'd like to think so, but I don't know if I'm going into an association with them with blinders on.

David Kennedy is the host of The Sport Authority, a weekly sports talk radio program on 91.5 FM The voice in Sacramento, California. He has been searching for the evidence of things not seen for most of his life. Until he finds it, he will just have to settle for searching for prozac over the counter - cheap!