The Propinquity Effect: A Third Wheel In Your Own Home Is You Being Stupid

You always need to be very cautious about having friends living with you as a married couple for an extended length of time. When your buddy visits and stays as a guest, there’s usually a lot of close interaction between you and your friend as you make the best use of your time together. But what you call “hanging out and having a beer” also doubles up with what evolutionary psychologists call “mate guarding behavior”. Or in plain English, you’re having fun with your friend, but you’re also cockblocking your friend getting to your wife.

But if you let your buddy actually start living with you, there’s no way to maintain the cockblock. You can’t just hang out and have a beer every single day when there’s real life and working late heading up your personal chore list. So at some point your buddy and your wife are going to be left together minus you. Now it’s unlikely that as your car pulls out of the driveway leaving them alone for the very first time, that they will lock eyes across the cornflakes and head back to your bedroom for five hours. But if you give it a couple of months just about anything can happen.

Now I know someone is going to say, “awww not my friend, I can trust him”.

Well no. No you can’t. You’re an idiot. You can’t trust him because he is your friend.

From Wikipedia…

Having a friend hanging out with your wife in your house is just a huge propinquity effect both because he is physically close to her and also psychologically close to her; he’s already accepted and positively regarded. Even if he gets under her skin a bit it’s a bad thing, that just means he emotionally engages her and he looms in her psyche. She may have minimal interest in him romantically at the start, but a few months into him living with you, it would be extremely unusual if she didn’t develop deeper feelings for him. Once that happens you’ve got two people with sexual motive, a bedroom and the perfect alibi for being alone in your house together.

Queue up… “what the hell?! You said you didn’t even like him and didn’t want him here!”

Oh and I’m just assuming that your buddy wants to bang your wife. Though I’ve got $100 that says “maybe I get some” as being one of the top two reasons he wanted to live with you in the first place. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s a perfectly reasonable impulse for him to have if your wife is even halfway attractive. I’m just staying that I wouldn’t balance a little red gas can on top of the electrical panel is all.

And of course all this plays out just the same from your wife’s end should she ever ask you to have one of her friends stay over for an extended period of time. Automatically as soon as the question is asked you’re going to immediately think “maybe I’ll get some” and probably agree if she’s even halfway attractive. Enough time living with your wife’s friend and even Steve Urkel could break her down. Well maybe not Steve Urkel, but you should be able to… especially if you screw your wife extra hard and make her orgasm loudly so her friend can hear it each night…

…anyway, before I derail this post into a fantasy experience about juggling two women in my own home, let’s just say no one ever stays over for too long at our place. I’d like to be helpful if she had friend that needed to stay for a while, but in the end I just know I can’t be trusted with that much temptation.