Oil and water: Friendship threesomes and foursomes
Sometimes getting a group of friends together can feel like mixing oil and water.
Like oil and water, sometimes the more friends you add to the mix, the more complicated and untenable things can become.
QUESTION
Hi Irene,
I have three people whom I consider my close friends. I am the common denominator with all three friends but when I try to get everyone together, it’s like oil and water.
I try to keep the peace but sometimes it seems like the problems might be my fault. Is there some way I can smooth this out?
Signed, Kerri
ANSWER
Hi Kerri,
When we watch shows like Sex & The City, Friends, or Girls, we think that our friends should be friends with all our other friends. Unless, everyone feels comfortable doing that, getting together as a group doesn’t always work or feel natural.
If you are friends with each of these women individually and they don’t get along collectively, the simple answer may to keep each of the friendships separate, and make them one-on-one friendships with you and each one.
Here are a few questions I responded to previously where other readers ran into similar problems—so you can see this happens quite often:
- Feeling awkward and conflicted about a threesome
- Friendship calculus: The problem of three
- When three’s a crowd
- On circle envy: Everyone can’t have a circle of friends
Hope this helps.
My best, Irene
I’ve never been a big fan of trying to do this. If you spend one on one time with people that are your friends, the quality of the time is better. Also, it can backfire and you can be someone who gets voted off the island.
Presumably, you get different things out of different friendships. Forcing people together just really doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense. It CAN leave you wondering when one of these friends has a circle that you’re not even occasionally included in, though.
If it were me, I wouldn’t get everyone together, since your other friends are only coming to be with you and they don’t get along so well. You tried, but the others weren’t as compatible with each other as they are to you.