I've always been the kind of person who tried to balance her romantic relationships with her friendships. I personally think it unhealthy to make your relationship partner your sole confidante, your sole emotional support, your sole social partner. But sometimes I feel very alone in this. I know that a new relationship, especially, is very heady, and that it's very easy to get sucked into that and make it your sole focus. At the same time, I don't understand people who distance themselves from their friends, or even ignore them completely, once they're in a relationship.
I've heard various reasons for it. If your relationship is important to you, then you want to talk about it, but your friends may not support you and the relationship, and thus may try to undermine the relationship. That talking about your relationship and any issues with it is unfair to the partner. And, of course, "if I have this relationship, I don't need any others."
But I cannot imagine doing the same. When I think through problems or issues in a relationship, it is a process for me, and it's not a process that I feel I should be going through with my relationship partner -- that just muddles everything. I use my closest friends as sounding boards for this, to help me work through how I'm feeling and what I'm thinking, and how best to approach my partner with the issue so that we can work through it. And if my friends are trying to undermine my relationship, then they are not my friends. In the end, friends are to love, help, and support us, not to judge us, and even if they question whether a relationship will ultimately make me happy, their job is to support me and help me see things clearly, not make up my mind for me.
And if a friend is romantically interested in me, that's wonderful, but if he's a true friend, he wants me to be happy, and doesn't define my happiness as only a possibility with him.
Nor would I want my partner to make me their sole focus. That's a lot of emotional neediness right there, and it makes problems doubly hard to work through if the partner doesn't have any good emotional support outside of the relationship. If I'm the only one he can talk about things with, but I'm the one he's having a problem with... where does that leave him?
As far as making someone your sole social support -- that I really don't get! I have a lot of interests, and I don't expect (or want) my partner to share all of those interests. I expect my partner to know and like friends I have from different areas of my life, but I don't expect that I cannot have social time without my partner.
All in all, making someone your sole emotional and social partner just seems dangerous to me. Because when things go wrong -- where do you go? If you basically tell your friends, "Sorry, I'm in a relationship now, so buh bye," do you really expect them to still be there for you after you've ignored them for however long? My divorce was enough of a lifestyle change without finding myself completely alone in the aftermath. So perhaps they're not expecting things to go wrong. But no relationship is without its bumps, so is that really realistic?
So what do you think? Am I totally off-base? When you're in a relationship, do you feel comfortable talking through issues in the relationship with others, or do you feel that's "private?" When you're with someone, do you want to devote yourselves only to that person, or do you prefer more of a varied social and emotional lifestyle?
