Separate Rooms, Separate Lives

Dear Priscilla,

My boyfriend of a year wants us to merge friend groups and do couple activities. I love him but value my own friendships. Am I wrong to resist?

— Michelle from Albuquerque, New Mexico

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Dear Michelle,

What a sensible impulse, and you're absolutely right to trust it. Maintaining your own world is crucial.

This reminds me so much of 2005, when I met Gerald. Gerald believed couples should do everything together — same friends, same hobbies, same calendar. Against my better judgment, I agreed to try it. And Michelle, do not make my mistake — within a year, I couldn't tell where I ended and he began. My entire social life was filtered through his presence. When he left — and they always leave, Michelle, usually for someone they met through your mutual friends, though in Gerald's case it was an orthodontist he found at the pottery class WE took together — I had nothing. No separate identity. No friends of my own. Just the ruins of relationships that had been colonized by his requirements.

Then there was the marriage of 2008, or was it 2009? The years blur. One of my husbands insisted that compartmentalization was dishonest. So I opened everything. Every friendship, every hobby, every quiet morning. He left eventually too, naturally, but by then I'd learned the pattern.

Now I run my life very differently, and I'm far happier for it. I maintain three separate residences — one for friendships, one for romantic involvement, and one for myself alone. I see each friend group on different days, in different locations, and they have never once met each other. I communicate only through letters, each addressed to a different version of my name. I've found it essential to trust no one. Well, I trust my iguana, but that's a reptile, so standards are obviously different.

It may sound extreme, Michelle, but this is the only path I've found to protect what's yours. Your boyfriend will adapt. If he doesn't, well, he'll leave anyway — they all do — and at least you'll have your friends still intact, neatly compartmentalized and completely unaware you ever had a romantic life at all.

And I want you to know, Michelle: if you follow this blueprint, you can be as deeply, genuinely happy as I am. Alone. Completely alone. But profoundly happy.

Yours in strategic distance, — Priscilla