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Is it normal for a married women to have 40 male Facebook friends?


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VeryBrokenMan

Just wondering if it's appropriate for a married woman to have that many male Facebook friends?

 

I posted this under my thread in the Infidelity section but thought I'd get a wider insight in this forum.

 

Assume that no cheating has taken place. Can men be Facebook friends without any thoughts of wanting more from the women? I can't relate since I don't have any Facebook friends that are women (other than relatives) and never have.

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I guess it depends. I'm a 50-year old woman and I've got 1,600 friends. Of those, I probably personally know and chat with 100+ of them, many of whom are men.

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Well that depends? Are we talking 40 male friends and 2 female friends? I have never bothered counting my male to female fb ratio. But I am friends with most of my friend's husbands as is my husband. Unless planning something or they are a relation I message 0 of them however the ones closer to the family we do comment on each others posts. None of my friends post sexy photos or what not so not really an issue.

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I probably have over 200 FB friends. FB is meaningless in & of itself.

 

If the woman in Q, spends all her time talking to & practically having cyber sex with these men on FB while ignoring her husband IRL that is a problem. A few likes & she reads their posts, no big deal at all. The bigger deal is why you think the # of her male friends is alarming. There is no marital vow that requires either spouse never interact with, talk to or look at member of the opposite sex for the rest of their lives.

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autumnnight

Hmmmm...between family, mutual, and a few coworkers, I had at least 50 or 60 male friends out of the 300-400 friends I have total. And I have had most of those for years, so it would have been before the end of the marriage.

 

The most I ever do is like a picture of someone's kids or make a funny comment if they post a "throwback Thursday" where we all have bad hair.

 

Of all the things to be concerned about these days, I don't think 40 FB friends is one of them unless one of those 40 comes along with tons of private messages or something.

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My wife had 40 Facebook male friends - most old high school friends. She doesn't anymore. Here is the story. One day she left her Facebook up on the laptop. We have had "trust" issues before so I didn't hesitate to spy. I found several private chats. One guy wanted her baby but she was so naive she didn't see it. There was one in particular that she had and I'll call him John. I could tell she had deleted earlier messages because the ones that remained started in the middle of a conversation. I confronted her about all of them but particularly about John. She denied they had inappropriate conversations and denied deleting any messages. After more investigation and hammering her she then admitted she deleted them because the messages were filling up. I said you have other chats that are long why haven't you deleted them? After more hammering she admitted she purposely deleted them. After more hammering she admitted she said inappropriate things as the reason to deleting them. She was not honest to me before or after I caught her and to this day this issue still comes up. I felt betrayed and our union disrespected.

 

She now realized what she did was wrong but to this day I'm not sure if it's because she truly didn't see a problem with private chats or if she is ling to me. I think the latter. Either way she agreed to remove any male friends that I did not know. She understands that this is how affairs start and she was well on her way. Either she gives you the keys to Facebook or she should remove her male friends. That's my suggestion.

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georgia girl

To be honest, I'm not sure how many male vs. female Facebook friends I have. I don't know my husband's mix either. (We actually just became "Facebook friends" right before we got engaged... FB doesn't mean a whole lot to either of us. :))

 

 

Anyway, I think for the most part Facebook is harmless. It's when folks start using it incorrectly - to do private chats with someone who they have a romantic interest in.

 

 

But the mere fact that some spouse has 40 opposite Facebook friends would not alarm me. Unless you have other problems with boundaries, fidelity and trust, then I don't think you have any reason to worry.

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Friskyone4u

if i am not wrong your wife had a big time affair and was not very remorseful and put you through a lot of grief. if that is the case, the male friends thing becomes more of an issue. There are some consequences for infidelity.

 

the number of friends is nowhere as important as

(1) who these guys are

(2) what and how often she is messaging them about

(3) how much time does she spend messaging these men

 

And if she is accepting friend invitations from new and strange men who are trying to establish a relationship with her, that should not be acceptable. no you cannot keep her from interactions with men, but her cheating on you makes it totally acceptable for you to have some idea of what she is doing with all these male "friends". i cannot see how anyone would suggest that she should have no consequences at all for betraying you and some privacy restrictions are not much of a consequence for having a long term affair which i believe she did.

 

And if the majority of her communications are with men i would want to know why that is??? there have been tons of articles published on how FB and other social media can be very detrimental to healthy marriages if abused. As the BH you have some rights here also, namely the right not to be blindsided and the right to set YOUR expectations and boundaries in order for her to receive the gift of another chance to remain your wife.

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It wouldn't matter if there were 400 if she has the right boundaries in place. Just as it wouldn't matter if it was only 1 if she doesn't...

 

Mr. Lucky

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TaraMaiden2

I have 32 facebook friends.

They're either relatives or adult close friends. These adult close friends are married, and I write and communicate with both the wife and the husband, on timelines, either theirs or mine..... It's all appropriate. If I PM anyone, it's usually family or female friends....

 

I have 2 particularly good, platonic and extremely close male friends. My H knows about both of them, and I have absolutely no secrets from him with regard to conversations I have with either of them.

 

Discussions never stray into anything remotely inappropriate. It would feel distinctly wrong, as they're more like brothers than friends to me....

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To be honest, the concept of Facebook just confuses the hell out of me. It makes it easy to investigate an old girlfriend, for example. Just go down her timeline, and it is all laid out: her friends, old boyfriends, pictures of her having fun with some paramour in 2011, the vacation she took with her group of friends, or just a bunch of horny guys in 2012, her opinions on everything from politics to religion to whatever. Just more stuff to fabricate excuses for. And then there are the facebook 'friends'. I have just 9 friends. Relatives all. Been that number for at least a year. Some of my more hip cousins have 700 - 1000 friends. Every day they are adding 4 - 5 more friends to their tally. My number of added friends - 0. Only way my friends number will go up is when the current crop of baby cousins get old enough to add me on to their friends list assuming having old man as a friend will not embarrass them ...:confused:

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Bittersweetie

I'm a fWW. Maybe just under half my FB friends are male. However I don't communicate with 95% of them, they're just on my news feed to see "Oh, so-and-so had a baby." The ones I do communicate with are relatives or close friends of both of us. My H is on FB too, and can access my account if he wants whenever.

 

Note: None of my FB friends are former boyfriends. I had one send me a request and it just felt weird so I declined.

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Nearly half of my hundreds of FB friends are male, because nearly half of the people I know are male. Some of them are old boyfriends, some of them are former coworkers or classmates, some of them are the dads from my son's Kindergarten class, etc. Men are people too and I am friendly with them as I would be with anyone. I belong to some private Facebook groups, some which are very mixed gender and a few which are pretty women-only. My husband has many female FB friends, some of them are ex-girlfriends, who he hasn't spoken to in real life in 20 years but they might occasionally "like" a picture of each other's kids or big work accomplishments, just as I do with my exes. For us there are no romantic embers still burning, it's just nice to see how life carries on for someone we once cared about. Neither he nor I is getting up to any shenanigans, although I suppose it would be easy enough for us to carry on secretly with inappropriate messages, etc. It would be easy enough for us to do that in real life, as well, but we aren't doing that either. I'm sure there are people who use Facebook underhandedly and find it aids them in deceptive communication or making inappropriate emotional connections, but it is completely normal to have friends of any and all genders on Facebook, and most mature adults should know how to act like mature adults even in virtual. If this is something she doesn't know, there's a problem.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I've got about 200 Facebook friends. My wife knows most of them to be honest, male and female. I don't do anything sneaky on there, everyone knows my situation and most of them know my wife. Some are HER friends and family. Facebook is not the be all and end all. It is just a website to connect with people.

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I have about 800 FB friends, all but a handful are people I actually have met in person. Those I haven't are "celebrities." I'd say my FB friends are probably 1/3 men, 2/3 female. Every single one of them are platonic.

 

And my friends list didn't change while engaged, or single.

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I probably have at least that many. I'm not a cheater. You can't tell if someone is cheating based on that.

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MuddyFootprints
I probably have at least that many. I'm not a cheater. You can't tell if someone is cheating based on that.

 

No, you can't tell from that. But, you are ripe. Please be very careful who you discuss your marital issues with.

 

Emotional bonding with someone of the opposite sex at this point will be very easy.

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My wife has 400 or so FB friends, all are people she knows personally and sees at least somewhat often.

 

Probably 40% are guys, and that seems totally normal to me.

 

If someone is going to cheat, they're going to cheat. Getting paranoid because she has any interactions at all with men is likely to push her away, not bring her closer.

 

I'd say that 40 male FB friends is unusually low, honestly. In the course of her entire life, there's only 40 guys who know her enough to be an FB friend?

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