My good friend is really cool. He’s basically a super nerd scientist guy. Despite having a ton of knowledge, he’s humble af, I’ve known him for years before I knew how high his educational qualifications go.

My friend just married someone with a nice job and a bougie family. I’m happy for my friend, I couldn’t give a fuck if all her convos revolve around past holidays, resorts, and pricey drinks. My friend is happy and and he feels secure with this woman, and I’m glad that things are going well for him.

My friend and his wife keep trying to organise double dates. I guess it feels natural, to bring us into the wider family. But what happens is that the men and women separate and have their own conversations. My gf finds this woman boring af, bragging about all the countries she’s traveled and nice places she’s been isn’t really interesting. I wonder if posh people are so used to talking to service workers and underlings who are required by their job to please them, that they have no idea how fucking boring they are.

  • EllenKelly [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    5 hours ago

    My girlfriend [sexual partner] hates my mate’s [sexual partner] wife [sexual partner]

    my sexual partner, hates my sexual partner’s, sexual partner.

    🧐

    lol

    sex segregated hangouts always rub me the wrong way, another vote towards demolishing that tradition.

  • bubbalu [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    23 hours ago

    Seconding @[email protected]. You have a responsibility to your partner to keep these double-dates a group event and not two parallel conversations.

    Right now your proposition to her is basically ‘Give up however many hours of your limited freetime so I can hang out with my buddy! I am going to ignore you and stick you with someone you actively dislike hanging out with.’ How else do you expect a rational person to feel about that?

  • woodenghost [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    24 hours ago

    But what happens is that the men and women separate and have their own conversations.

    Maybe your girlfriend would appreciate it, if you didn’t just let this separation along traditional gender lines happen as if it was an unstoppable force of nature. Keep it balanced or just keep the boring friend talking to yourself the whole evening. Should be easy, since you said it dosn’t bother you. Then your gf can have intellectually stimulating conversations with your mutual interesting friend while you do that.

  • GoodGuyWithACat [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    23 hours ago

    What other people said about keeping the conversations between everyone. BUT it’s also normal for you and your buddy to just spend time one on one. You should do that, then on your double dates you won’t feel the urge to split conversations as much.

  • PapaEmeritusIII [any]@hexbear.net
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    1 day ago

    My partner has a friend whose wife my partner and I both dislike! I refuse to do double dates because I know I’m not going to have a good time.

    She’s just such a lib - rich upbringing, distaste for unions, refusal to consider the possibility that things could get better through collective action. She has kind of a mean, spiteful sense of humor. She’s inconsiderate towards anyone she doesn’t like much (including my partner and I).

    She’s also homophobic/transphobic, even though she doesn’t think she is! She makes snide comments about her husband’s masculinity when he does anything that doesn’t read cishet to her. She even did it once with my partner! It was so pathetic! My partner and I aren’t insecure about his masculinity, so it was really funny to us and we still joke about it to this day.

    • Belly_Beanis [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      22 hours ago

      She’s also homophobic/transphobic, even though she doesn’t think she is!

      God I fucking hate liberals. Had to listen to my mom and her friend go off about Caitlyn Jenner. “I don’t care if he want to be a woman or is gay or whatever. I just don’t think he should be playing women’s sports. To me, he’s always going to be Bruce Jenner.”

      If you don’t care, then why are you dead naming and misgendering her, while saying trans women can’t compete in women’s sports? I spoke up about how trans people have been allowed in the Olympics for years, yet the number of them who have won medals is tiny (I think 2 bronze metals in 30 years or some shit?). So either they deliberately lose because it “gives real women a chance!” or they win and it’s “they had an unfair advantage!” There will be an excuse to unfairly penalize them, on top of all the usual bullshit.

      So it’s not just petite-bourgeois asshats. It’s reactionary white people and people who settled on their worldview at 23 and have kept it the same for 40+ years because God forbid they read a fucking book that’s non-fiction.

      • EllenKelly [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        5 hours ago

        Jenner uses her old name when talking about her past [do not look at her ex wife’s wikipedia talk page], but also, she doesnt even play sport anymore, she’s in her 60s lol

        you are using her old name, even if youre quoting someone, probably could just say [their old name], or something

        anyway, fuck Jenner, she was invited by israel to be the guest of honour at the pride parade this year and did a tour of ‘oct 7 sites’

      • ButtBidet [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
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        21 hours ago

        because God forbid they read a fucking book that’s non-fiction.

        every single liberal I know. Or if it is non-fiction, it’s this shit:

    • reaper_cushions [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      23 hours ago

      My girlfriend’s brother has this tendency to say insanely racist things, probably without recognising them as such at all. One example would be him telling my girlfriend that he wouldn’t want an Afghan in the family either, relating to a coworker of his having found himself with an Afghan son in law, much to that coworker’s displeasure. The fact that Afghan isn’t exactly and ethnicity and that I am of one of the more prominent ethnicities of Afghanistan probably eluded him.

    • ButtBidet [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
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      22 hours ago

      I always wonder how people end up in relationships with people who do problematic things. Like did they start dating as teenagers when they didn’t know any better?

  • TommyBeans [they/them, he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 day ago

    People talk about what they know, rich people are just living in a different bubble so the disconnect to regular folks is bigly. I’m sure this lady thinks she’s endlessly charming and entertaining.

    I have a friend like this, he’s pretty well off and his only real hobby is traveling and his leisure time is spent going to bars and restaurants. So our conversations basically revolve around talking about him and his spouse’s last vacation. I can’t afford vacations or eating out so I can’t contribute at all, nor would I really want to, and when I turn the topic to my hobbies and interests the conversation peters out because unlike me he can’t even fain the interest in a conversation to keep it going.

    So our weekly conversations are boring af for me because it’s just listening to him talk about some new Peruvian restaurant he went to, we talk about his last trip to Peru, I yap for a bit about potatoes, bring up a knitting project I’m working on, and then the conversation is over. I definitely commiserate with your spouse, lol.

    I wonder if posh people are so used to talking to service workers and underlings who are required by their job to please them, that they have no idea how fucking boring they are.

    I definitely think so. Charitably, they’re trying to make connections with others in their social circle through common shared interests, but they live in a such a different world, oblivious to how most live, that it comes across as very disconnected. Even commiserating about problems ends up being two folks talking over each other. I have no reference frame to care about some small mishap getting your fancy car detailed, and he has no frame of reference for my frustration with having to air up my slowly leaking tire every day before driving to work because the leak can’t be patched and I can’t afford a new tire.

      • TommyBeans [they/them, he/him]@hexbear.net
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        20 hours ago

        I don’t really have close family, and he’s the one friend to reach out to me during my depressive phases and actually care about how I’m feeling. His whole family really, they’ll ask for updates on how I’m doing and I’m sure they’d help with anything if I asked. He’s such a good guy, I’ll put up with a lot from him.

        Every once in a while we’ll stumble into a really good conversation and have a blast, but yeah, most of the time it feels like forcing a conversation with my Dad or something.

  • sewer_rat_420 [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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    20 hours ago

    I have a friend who has another close friend that is like this, but also is especially obsessed with jewelry. Like, can’t stop posting her jewelry every day, always shopping and buying new jewelry. Mostly gold rings and bracelets and the like.

    She’s also traveling constantly, sometimes for work. And of course she has a Disneyland annual pass.

    Literally nothing else of substance in her conversations or Instagram feed except traveling, luxury, and jewlery, I had to just mute her and we refuse to go to the parties she hosts now.

    I need cool normal friends ffs…

  • TheLepidopterists [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 day ago

    This is so weird, I JUST listened to Stavros Halkias talk to a dude about this on his podcast. Although that guy was married, and it was his wife who hated his friend’s wife for being a Disney adult.

  • even in the realm of travel/trips–i make a distinction between “tourists” and “travelers” in that tourists go some place and get waited on and stay in accommodations, travelers do shoe string stuff, engage in work-trade, home-stays, are in a community for longer–i find it difficult to talk to tourists as a traveler sometimes.

    like, i traveled solo on a competitive grant i won (to pay for the $$$ flight) to get to the other side of the planet and took a series of planes, trains, and buses to get to a very remote place, a farming village in some mountains. for almost two months, i lived in some worker housing with a group of locals, only one other foreigner was there and they were from that continent and had emigrated to where we were like 10 years prior. my local language skills were cave man and illiterate, but the other foreigner had good english so it was ideal for immersion. i worked, quasi-not legally according to my visa, for room and workday lunches. it was hard physical labor in a hot/humid climate. over the entire summer, i took a single two day trip to an even more remote island with some unique ecological characteristics, hiked up a mountain on a sketchy forest trail, slept in a primitive cabin on top of my bag because there were monkeys, etc. i bought groceries, sent mail, went to the drug store, had a favorite convenience store snack, and was introduced to little restaurants in my community by my coworkers. aside from my arrival/departure airport flight back to the US, i saw one other honkey in the entire summer, and just on that little 2 day trip, across a quiet restaurant when i was on my little day trip. no clue if they spoke english. i learned an OK amount of the local language, ate my meals and drank after work with my co-workers every night sometimes using paper and pencil with drawings and pictures to communicate ideas. i was so wildly out of place that when i was running errands, little kids and old people would stop what they were doing and stare at me like i was from another planet. even working on the side of the road, random people would honk and wave at me with big smiles. or just look at me like they weren’t sure they were hallucinating.

    tourists will be like, “oh yeah, i’ve been there.” by which they mean they were in that country for maybe part of a week, staying in an international hotel in the world class capital megalopolis and going to the big touristy restaurants and a few of the big international tourist attractions nearby, taking cabs or hotel shuttles. basically, an experience that might as well be london or nyc or beijing or mexico city. and they’ll have spent like $4000 or whatever, and my trip cost me like $250 out of pocket… which is why i could afford it, since i had about $300 at the time.

    that was the most extreme example, but generally if i am making the effort to go to a place, i am going because i am looking to cultivate an intensive learning experience i can’t reasonably simulate by watching documentaries/videos, reading books/articles. i am going to read books in advance. i am going to listen to conversational audio lessons of the local language. i am going to figure out a way to travel/live cheaply by staying with regular ass people and hopefully working alongside them. if i can’t pull all that off, i want to do some kind of primarily educational slow tour through an institution or an institutionally affiliated fixer. and, because of all this, and finding external funding or connecting it to some kind of institutional/professional development trip, there is invariably a deliverable attached afterward. like writing a 10,000 word paper on a specific topic and/or delivering presentations about the trip to colleagues. and i don’t particularly enjoy putting together these deliverables, but it’s a reasonable, logical expectation for material support and in the spirit of why i would travel.

    we live in a historically unique time that accommodates distant travel, but the material and environmental costs are profound. i think anyone taking advantage of the current infrastructure to go be somewhere and see some things in person should take the responsibility that goes with it. so people who just flit about to have a little treat-eating fancy-lad tour irritate the shit out of me. my traveling was already infrequent before covid. like maybe every few years i would store up the intellectual/emotional capacity to go through all this rigamarole right as some opportunity would open up, requiring me to commit right then. the irony is i am a homebody. there is nothing i like more than just chilling in my own space, lmao. i’ve only left the country once since covid, and that was because of a family obligation which i tried to resist but was unanimously overruled. and i did my damnedest to make the most of it without being irresponsible, epidemiologically.

    anyway, if it ever comes up that i’ve been some similar place, rich tourists are always trying to relate their stories to me of sipping umbrella drinks on a beach somewhere while indigenous people wait on them and dance/sing for them. to me, those people don’t travel. they tour. they’re bullshit, it’s all mickey mouse, and we have almost no overlap in our experiences or interests. they brag about haggling access to an exclusive lounge, enjoying an expensive treat, seeing an exotic animal from a car, or have their harrowing story of bothering some poor hotel worker to help them find a compatible phone charger or replacement medication. they are unworthy of my stories.

    • whiskers165 [she/her, she/her]@hexbear.net
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      19 hours ago

      Travelers grindset with a tourists budget is my sweet spot for a trip

      I wanna pull my eyes out listening to any of my international tourist friends talk about their trips, like I could show you how to have more fun lighting that money on fire visiting a small no name city one state over but you would rather burn it hanging out in over priced tourists traps in the most Americanized partition of wherever you’re visiting

    • ButtBidet [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
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      23 hours ago

      I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve done a tiny bit of holiday’ing before 2020, albeit within the price range that a teacher could afford. TBH, my biggest issue with it now is being forced into proximity with posh people. They’re just more selfish, they let their kids run amok, and they’re the last people to do any sort of respiratory disease precaution (although few are nowadays). Also I just don’t give a fuck about any of the things they’re talking about.

      A long time ago I stayed a month with my friend in their small town in China. It was very hard but it was the best time of my life. My mandarin has never been so good. Never saw a single white person.

      rich tourists are always trying to relate their stories to me of sipping umbrella drinks on a beach somewhere

      I feel like this is half of the convos that I’m exposed to with white acquaintances. Not that I’ve always been a communist, but it’s been a real wake-up after I’ve started to read more theory.

      seeing an exotic animal from a car

      Or seeing an exotic animal in a zoo by another name. Those “animal sanctuaries” that are anything but.

      • A long time ago I stayed a month with my friend in their small town in China. It was very hard but it was the best time of my life. My mandarin has never been so good.

        exactly. seeing how people are living is a big one. obviously, it’s just one person or the people in a residential area, but that’s real compared to staying in the Hyatt where the only locals you see are being paid to make sure you want for nothing while appearing happy.

        after a while, rich tourists people equate the culture of a place with the quality of service they experience. “the people are rude” is usually code for “i wandered outside of the playpen and had an interaction with someone outside the tourism sector.”