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.

Lol you expect me to believe a HexBear user had a GIRLFRIEND and a FRIEND?

r/ThatHappened

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.

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.

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.

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.