Last weekend, the woman I’ve been dating asked me to take a break from the weekly pub quiz where we met. She wanted somewhere she could unwind without our dating life getting mixed up with her social life. Unfortunately, the place she had in mind was also where I’d been seeing my friends every Thursday for almost three years.
I’m 29, she’s 28, and we’ve been seeing each other for about a month. Until this conversation, things had been going great. Meeting through something I already enjoyed had seemed like a particularly convenient start. I hadn’t realized the convenience might come with an eventual request to stop showing up.
She only started going to the quiz a few months ago. Most of the people on our team were my friends before she joined. This wasn’t a case of me following her into an established group and immediately making myself a permanent fixture. I was already a fixture. Admittedly, that’s not the most romantic way to describe a man, but it does explain my attendance record.
Her explanation was that she didn’t want our dating life mixing with her social circle yet. She said she wasn’t trying to control me. She wanted one place where she didn’t have to worry about how things were going between us. I can understand wanting some breathing room when you’re only a month into seeing someone. Every shared activity can start to feel a little less casual once you’ve also got a relationship to think about.
What threw me was the proposed arrangement. Her breathing room would involve me missing something I’d been doing long before we met. She was asking for a break from my company at the quiz I’d been attending with my friends for years. I could understand the need for space more easily than the choice of who had to leave.
I told her I wasn’t going to stop seeing my friends every Thursday just because we were dating. That wasn’t me saying we had to do everything together. It was me objecting to the one activity she had picked for us to do separately. I don’t think a month of dating should quietly cancel almost three years of turning up.
I still don’t know what she expects the separation to accomplish, or how long ‘for a while’ is supposed to last. Maybe being around me there makes it harder for her to relax. That’s the reason she gave, and I don’t have another one to substitute for it. But understanding why she wants a place to herself doesn’t make this particular place feel like a reasonable request.
For her, the quiz is somewhere to unwind. For me, it’s still Thursday with the same friends. I’ve told her I’m not giving that up.
