I have been with my husband for 20 years. During the first few years, he would occasionally hang out with about four friends. I’ve always been lucky enough to have quite a lot of friends and I really value them.
In contrast, my husband no longer has any friends. He occasionally goes for a run with one local dad we know, but never goes for a coffee or a meal. The husbands of my friends are all really nice guys, but there is something wrong with each of them in my husband’s eyes; their idiosyncrasies irk him.
My husband’s lack of friends means he puts pressure on me to “entertain” him. However, I work, albeit part-time, we have two fairly young children to care for, a dog etc, and I feel the load is unbalanced and overwhelming. The pressure is placed on me to be all things, when he’s making no effort to make any friends. I frequently suggest to him that he tries to get together with some of the local dads we know, but there’s always a very specific reason why they are imperfect in some way. On occasion he hangs out with his sister, who’s quite toxic and passive-aggressive (which he acknowledges).
My husband is very insecure. He tries to control with distain and dismissiveness. He seems to have a deeply entrenched need to blame when something goes seemingly “wrong”. He withdraws affection and kindness on a whim. He soaks up – in fact, fishes for – praise and compliments, yet never administers any.
How can I convince him of the need to make his own friends and help him to achieve this?
I started off thinking this was a problem about your husband not having any friends, but I think the issues are between both of you, and go far beyond who’s on his Christmas card list.
I asked clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst Dr Stephen Blumenthal to look at your letter with me. He explained that just as parents often wrongly identify what is actually a family problem with just one child (the “problem” child), you may be identifying the problem as your husband and his lack of friends. Whereas it would be more helpful to think about it as a problem for both of you.
We struggled to see what you liked about your husband. Could it be that, as Dr Blumenthal observed, “several potential issues have emerged, since you’ve got married and the relationship has changed?” Maybe you’ve both grown in different directions; did your husband not have these traits before or were you more tolerant of them?
“What works for you – coffee with friends, meals – won’t necessarily work for him,” Dr Blumenthal said, “and it sounds like you are applying your solution as something that you think would also work for him.”
Generally, women like to meet up to talk face to face, and men tend to prefer to talk about emotional matters while doing things side by side, hence your husband having a running buddy.
But, more than that, it seems you’re the one who isn’t happy, not your husband, who, as Dr Blumenthal said, “seems discontented from your description, but may be happy focused just on you”.
This doesn’t mean you have to tolerate it, of course; it sounds intense. But I think you may have to face up to the fact that it’s you who wants change, not him, and how and if you can facilitate that. Understandably, the thought of that may be frightening. I think you’ve come up with an idea that if your husband just had more friends everything would be OK, but would it? Or would he just be out of the way more often? Maybe while your husband is the repository for everything that’s wrong with the relationship, it stops you having to look at the reality of things?
Dr Blumenthal said: “I think you may need to recognise that something has happened for both of you. Try to look at your relationship as a couple rather than [just] him being the one with the problem.”
I think you may be both stuck, so I’d really recommend some counselling. If not for both of you (you can’t make him go) then definitely for you to work out what you want. Looking at our own place in things – what we want, what we don’t want, what we can change – is more empowering than projecting all of our unhappiness on to another person.
• For counselling information visit: British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy Bacp.co.uk; College of Sexual and Relationship Therapists cosrt.org.uk; UK Council for Psychotherapy ukcp.org.uk.
• Every week, Annalisa Barbieri addresses a personal problem sent in by a reader. If you would like advice from Annalisa, please send your problem to ask.annalisa@theguardian.com. Annalisa regrets she cannot enter into personal correspondence. Submissions are subject to our terms and conditions.
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