It’s the Eve of Christmas Eve, so I’m going to take a few minutes with my eggnog and hazelnut liqueur to address a common misconception about relationships.
A couple of my guy friends have recently been asking me odd relationship questions, like, “thirtyplus, why does my girlfriend have so many guy friends? What does she do when she hangs out with her guy friends?” and in one case, “Why is my girlfriend cuddling with other guys?”
After getting over my astonishment at the amount of perplexity on their faces, I have tried to explain.
The short answer is, “Because they’re wired that way.” But that answer is invariably unsatisfying. Surely there must be more to it!
Well, as it happens, there is.
First of all, let’s get one thing straight:
A woman’s brain is hardwired to put men in one of two categories.
A) Fuckable
B) Unfuckable
Or, correspondingly:
A) My lover! (or potential lover!)
B) My best friend-buddy platonic friend (i.e., my girlfriend)
Notice, if you will, that Category B corresponds to a functional and effective emasculation of said male.
In other words…if you are “friends” to an attractive woman who you would rather be “more than friends” with…she does not believe you have balls. She thinks you are a woman.
Now, without getting into how she could POSSIBLY think that, let’s return to the dichotomy of the female mind and its corresponding categories for men, above.
Category A, conveniently enough, correspond with what many people like to call the “Alpha Male”.
Category B, also conveniently, corresponds with what many people like to call the “Beta Male”.
When your current girlfriend first met you, it is very likely that you were acting in such a way that she put you in the “A” category — she saw you as an Alpha male. Despite what some people like to believe, first impression DO matter (an awful lot, in fact) and decisions about whether someone is fuckable or unfuckable are usually made in the first 30 seconds of meeting someone new.
It is much less likely that your current girlfriend initially saw you as a Beta male — essentially a female — and then later changed her mind and decided you were Alpha, hot, and therefore that she would sleep with you.
You see, in woman’s mind, there are two paths a man can take over the course of her knowing him — corresponding with the two categories the men in her life fall into.
Traveling from Point A to Point B, or Alpha to Beta, is a rapid or gradual “betaization”. She thought you were a potential mate, but you did something to screw it up (this is an extremely easy route).
From Point B to Point A, or Beta to Alpha: she thought you were a huge dork and basically female, but you proved her wrong. (This is a common route of underdog heroes in movies and comic books, the way they “get the girl” against all odds — think Spiderman and Mary-Jane). This is extremely hard route.
Think of path A-B as one tiny slip that sends you plummeting down the icy slope of a mountain. Think of the opposite route, B-A, as, as trying to crawl up that same precipitous near-vertical slope, naked, and covered in motor oil (or your favorite lubricant) with no climbing gear.
The A-B route is also colloquially known as “ending in the friend zone”. Route B-A is is the definition of the “unlikely hero”. If you’ve gone the A to B route and are in the Friend Zone, you may still be able to dig yourself out.
Let’s call these two routes “relational arcs” — that is, they are not just limited to serious boyfriend-girlfriend relationships, but also any acquaintance between a boy and a girl, or man or a woman, in modern first-world industrialized feminized countries. This explains why some people hook up when the first meet, as well as why some people know each other for years and finally “ruin the friendship” in favor of hooking up.
SO, now that we’ve established these categories and “relationship arcs”, let’s get back to the matter at hand: Why Your Girlfriend Is Cuddling With Other Guys.
Given the arcs and categories presented above, there are two MAIN reasons your girlfriend keeps around a lot of “guy friends” and/or cuddles with them:
A) Social proof
B) They provide her with something you do not
That’s pretty much it. Girls are simple: if something is not in some way valuable to them, somehow in their best interest or serving some important function in their life, they generally won’t keep it around. NOTE: sometimes, an “important function” in a girl’s life can be the creation of drama, trauma or distress.
So if your girl keeps a lot of guy friends / cuddle buddies around, or even just one “special” guy, you’d better believe there’s a damn good reason.
From my own experience: Having been both the guy worried and the “other guy”, I can say with absolute certainty that “special” male friends are usually serious trouble. I cannot count how many concerts, parties, or fancy dinners I have been to with a long-term fuck buddy and her boyfriend or husband (who she was cheating on with me). The poor guy was forced to act nice and chummy with me while secretly being deeply threatened by and suspicious of me.
Reason (A), social proof, is extremely simple and pretty self-explanatory. Having a lot of friends of the opposite sex serves a number of purposes:
Reason (B) is the one to worry about. Having “kept” friends for social proof is a pretty common social maneuver; just about everybody does it, and the truly sick people who also use their “kept” friends as sex toys are pretty rare (mostly because of the skill required). So reason (A) is no real worry; but if other guys are providing something to your girl that YOU are not, that is cause for worry, because that “something” that she is not getting from you (but rather is getting from someone else) is leverage that could be used by this other guy to replace you.
A couple scenarios that come to mind:
A) You are not physically affectionate enough with your girl in the way she really likes (i.e. cuddling) and therefore she is finding it somewhere else.
B) You are not emotionally close enough with your girl (or faking that closeness well enough) and therefore she is substituting physical closeness with someone else in an attempt to manufacture emotional closeness
C) Your girl has found a guy that is more Alpha than you (or he has found her) and they are in the process of hooking-up, only moving slowly enough that you happen to hear about the “cuddling” phase that is usually followed shortly thereafter by sex.
A lot of women (the majority, perhaps) have an intractable case of “swinging-monkey” syndrome — while moving through life, they do not let go of one branch before they already have a firm grasp on another. Of course by “branches” I mean “boys” (notice the subtle imagery in this analogy).
So, if you are vigilant, often you can catch signs that a girl is about to cheat on you before she does, and the cheating leads to a full-on relationship (i.e., replacement). Cuddling with other guys is *sometimes* a sign; just as often as not, though.
So, although I have touched on a lot of different ideas and dynamics in this diary, I have to caution that even armed with the above rudimentary information, the question of “What to Do” about your particular situation is practically unanswerable in general terms. Situations differ hugely; relationship dynamics fer somewhat; girls differ just barely enough to make it interesting.
For a comedic 2-minute summary of the above, see Chris Rock: