Are Your Friends Keeping You From Finding A Decent Date?
I was pounced on at happy hour Tuesday night by some friends who wanted to discuss my post about dating a Fair Weather Boyfriend. It was a good happy hour special and these guys were ready for a lively discussion on the topic.
All agreed that the Fair Weather Boyfriend does exist in the dating wilds of DC and even offered alternative names like prick, schmuck, self-important ish head; and others that I can’t print without setting off internet protection software. From the group came a barrage of stories about dating Fair Weather Boyfriends and the downright douchey behavior of these self-important types. It was also mentioned that DC doesn’t have the monopoly on this, as you can go to any major city and hear different variations of The Fair Weather Boyfriend’s primal scream: “I gotta do me first” “my boys come first” or; “I’m an actor slash ____.”
After hearing several stories, I put forth a hypothesis to the group that I invite you to consider:
Is there a correlation between our circle of friends and the quality of the men that we date?
Just to be clear, I’m not talking about a situation where friends are drinking the Haterade or blocking you from successfully meeting a potential future boyfriend. What I mean is, if a person has many acquaintances but few, if any, close friends, is the inability to find a man who isn’t a Fair Weather Boyfriend related to the non-meaningful friendships a person has?
As gay men we rely heavily on our circle of friends for general camaraderie and opportunities to meet new people, since no one meets anyone at a bar anymore. If I keep a tight circle of stand-up guys as friends, then chances are any guy I meet through them will be just as decent. The other side to this is if I keep a circle of surface-level friends, acquaintances, bar buddies, etc. then the men I meet via our hanging out together will be just as surface-oriented and more prone to being a Fair Weather Boyfriend.
The group of guys suddenly became quiet as they pondered what I was saying. One guy eventually spoke and said, “While I’m not entirely sure your 100% correct, I have made a conscious effort lately to develop closer friendships with people. It may or may not impact if I can find a good date but at least I’m making better friends in the process.”
For me, I know there was a time when I felt that I didn’t have strong friendships within my circle of friends. When I made a conscious effort to move away from those surface relationships, it left room for better energy and better people to come into my life.
I don’t think any of what I’m saying is new but I wonder if folks have really given it a thought or two when it comes to dating. We are all familiar with the old saying “birds of a feather, flock together” but have we looked at how, in the context of dating, this saying may have more truth than we initially realized?
I’m not sure whether it’s your friends that keep you from finding a date, or where you go with them. Let me explain . . .
To a very great extent, gay (male) culture and the institutions that serve it are oriented around one organizing principle: That you are single and you are out looking to get laid. This is true of bars, clubs, gay cruises and vacation spots. It dominates gay-themed advertising, and of course gay web sites and apps like Grindr.
Yes, it’s changed a little since getting gay-married became the latest fashion statement, but it’s still largely true. The straight world, it seems to me, is still much more couples-oriented than the gay world.
So if you want to date someone, you have to make a choice: You can either bring that person to these environments, which are not exactly conducive to the formation of long-term relationships, or you can avoid them and feel as though you have not only abandoned your friends but have effectively retired from living an “authentic” gay life. Neither of those choices is particularly appealing, and I think this dilemma inhibits dating and especially challenges longer-term relationships.
Of course, if your friends are all a bunch of nasty, bitter queens who would sabotage your efforts at a relationship because they can’t manage one of their own, or are such self-absorbed princesses that anyone who is relationship material would be repelled by them (and, therefore, by you), that’s a different problem. But I can’t believe either of those things is true.
Thanks for your comment. You’ve raised a lot of good points and I think I’ll address some of them in a new post, but I do want to say that I agree with you that there aren’t enough places in gay culture where one can take a date.
Part of why I do Great Place For a Date posts is because I think it’s hard to find places and events where you can actually have an engaging time with someone on a date. I think guys do want more options than the standard, dinner/movie-and-up-at-a-bar, and sometimes folks just need someone to suggest something a little different. I’ll move these posts to their own category soon.
xoxo,
-Kamal