I've looked around, and haven't really found much on this topic. Often mentioned, but rarely discussed in detail, in any thread I've found yet anyway. One article here talks about it, but doesn't really offer much about how to deal with it. The general consensus here, based on another thread I started (and bombed on, unfortunately), seems to be 'there is nothing you can do about it, oh well.' My apologies, but I'm not buying that, just yet, anyway.
So what I would like is not so much a discussion (not that I can control a thread, but it's worth a shot) but to actually hear some of ya'lls experiences in this department. What did you do? What did you not do? Did it work? Did it backfire? Anything that helped, even a little? Anything help a lot? How would you handle what you tried differently if you could rewind life?
While I fully understand that there is little likelihood of stopping it, I simply can't imagine there aren't things we could do to help mitigate the damage these well meaning . . . and not-so-well-meaning friends of the people we love cause to our efforts to hold our marriages together.
What is your experience with this situation?
Life may be short, but . . . well . . . it actually IS short, now that I think about it . . . . particularly when compared to planetary formation and stuff.
"not-so-well-meaning" friends may as well be affair partners. I believe they should be snipped out of the relationship if at all you have any way. If the spouse is listening to friends who speak ill of you, even when you know your doing right - then you have a problem with your spouse.
They are enablers. They may as well be encouraging a drug addiction. They need to be removed from the picture when possible.
Many of these "not-so-well-meaning" friends give advice in order to steer your life. They get a small ego boost from doing it. Its why some friends are always giving bad advice. So they may "enable" you to do some things that in your normal mind, you know you shouldn't be doing.
To directly answer your question from my perspective....
I would not worry that much about advice that her friends give her. At the end of the day, she has to make her own decision. And, remember this about her girlfriends....they can NOT provide the husband/wife relationship to her, so again she will make her own decision on that.
I worried about this same thing with my W for a while, but I found that it settled down after a month or two.
Now my W is telling some of her friends that we are working on our R. Guess what, her friends are just as supportive of that as they were of her wanting a divorce.
Bottom line from my perspective....her friends are going to give her a listening ear for what she wants to do at the time they are talking. If you trust your W, give her that luxury. If she is like my W, she does not want to talk to you about it right now.
I don't know the answer to your "what if?" questions.
Most married women don't hang out solely with single friends in my opinion. And if most of the married friends are in affairs, you have to be careful AS A COUPLE about the people in your circle of friends.
My W and I have been married 10+, and neither of the above would apply to either of us. Neither of us have mostly single friends, and most of our M friends are 1) not having an A, and 2) still in their first marriage.
I guess my whole point is you either trust your W's moral compass OR you don't.
I guess I got lucky enough to have a wife that has friends who are single and "baby mothers". I'm not even sure there is one stable married couple among her friends and family members. Actually there are a couple of marriages in her family, but only a couple.
In some area's of the country this is more normal than a stable married point of view.
Sorry to hear that DLS. I feel for you and don't even pretend to have an answer for you. Our families do not have stability in the M dept, but for the most part our friends do. We have very few divorced friends.
