My spouse's friends

Not sure if you all know but there's a How To Marry a Bulgarian group on Facebook. I know many of the people that have joined but the best thing about it is that it gives me a chance to meet other mix-breeders that I have not yet had the pleasure of meeting in person. If you are already on Facebook you should consider joining. About a week ago I sent out an email to all group members asking if they had any questions they wanted me to address on this blog and I got several great emails with even better questions. In the next week or so I will be tackling questions about friends and accents and in-laws... Let me know if you've got more.

Here's an excerpt from an email I got from Milla in England:

I am married to an Englishman and am experiencing my first year in England. What I find most distressful (apart from the English weather, of course) is the fact that I have no friends in England. I am used to having a few good friends on whom I can count and many not so close friends with whom I also have a great fun. I had to move to England and now all of a sudden I can't meet my friends anymore. Skype and Facebook make things a bit less harsh but the truth is this new life in a whole new social environment is not as easy as studying abroad for example.

I'd be happy to read about or even participate in a discussion about finding friends in a new country. Especially in a island country! My little survey based on my own and my friends' experience shows that making friends in an island country is a particularly tough nut to crack.

I think that the friends thing is an issue for any couple: married or not, bi-national or not. I have my friends and you have yours. What happens when we get together? Difficult as that is, things get especially tricky when a couple moves, right? It's one thing if you move to a place that you are both new to, but it gets a little bit awkward when you move to a place where one of you already has a friend base. When we lived in Bulgaria, it took Kyle a long time to meet friends of his own. He loved all of my friends but I think that at least initially it felt exactly like that: they were MY friends and he found it difficult to move past the status of Petya's Significant Other.

I find myself in a similar boat now that we are in Memphis. Here I go by "Kyle Grady's wife Petya." Not only am I introduced as somebody's wife but I get to be referred to by my first name only. I absolutely understand WHY it happens. I am, in fact, in Memphis only because Kyle got a job here. Also, people have a hard enough time hearing my first name. Throwing in a hyphenated Bulgarian-American last name would make it even more difficult than it already is. I understand all of that. I just don't happen to like it so much. Or maybe it's all that MadMen talk that's really getting to me and I am especially sensitive to commonplace sexisms. I don't know.

Obviously, I think it's good to make friends "of your own". Milla and I talked about yoga classes as a great place for that. And I think that some people really need a space of their own to feel like they are an independent human being. Especially when they partner up. BUT, it seems to me, that the whole idea of maintaining independence by keeping your friends separate is based on a very strange notion that people do not enjoy their partners' acquaintances, which doesn't make sense to me at all.

To the contrary.

Kyle happens to have a great taste in friends and that, actually, is one of many things I love about him. Not only does he know great people, but he is also great with them and around them. To see them together makes me really really happy in the same way that human kindness in general makes me really really happy. I think it's personal insecurities that in the past have made me wonder if his friends really are my friends. And ever since I decided to just relax about it, I have actually been able to cultivate friendships with "his friends" that are different from the ones that he has with them. My conversations/jokes/memories with many of those people are very different from his. And, quite honestly, that has been way more interesting and liberating to me than simply trying to look for other people just for the sake of being able to say that I have friends that are only mine.

So, I guess, if I had one piece of advice to give about making friends it would be to just go ahead, take a shortcut and really give your partner's buddies a chance.

I am very much looking forward to hearing what you guys think.