Dear Tell All: My wife and I bought our first house a couple years ago in a west-side neighborhood near Odana Hills Golf Course. My wife quickly made friends with other women in the neighborhood, and we socialize with them and their husbands. My wife loves the potluck dinners that often happen at one house or another. But I can’t stand them because I have nothing in common with her friends’ husbands.
Every one of them is a guy’s guy. They build things and fix things. They hike and kayak. They play basketball and golf. They can discuss every nuance of a Green Bay Packers or Badgers football season.
Call me a traitor to Wisconsin manhood, but I’m not into any of this stuff. I like to read novels, biographies, and the New York Times. I like to see performances at the Overture Center. Whenever I bring up these subjects, my male neighbors just stare at me blankly. So I keep quiet as they talk sports in one room and the women laugh and gossip in another.
The worst part is that the menfolk also socialize together on weekend nights, going out to bars or playing poker at each other’s houses. In neighborly fashion, they usually ask me along. I often go because my wife would be furious if I appeared to snub them. She doesn’t want her women friends to think I hate their husbands, saying it would ruin her relationships in the neighborhood.
Life in Wisconsin would be so much easier if I followed the Packers, but I just don’t have it in me. As a result, I sometimes feel quite lonely by the end of a weekend. Do you have any survival tips for an outcast among the manly men?
Who Is Clay Matthews?
Dear Who: Let me get this straight—you love books and newspapers and culture and you’re complaining about living in Madison? If you haven’t noticed, pal, you’re in mecca. With a bit of effort, I’m sure you can find likeminded male intellectuals and esthetes to hang out with on weekends.
Of course, that will involve turning down invitations to bars and poker games with your macho neighbors. It’s not fair of your wife to expect you to maintain separate friendships with men you don’t like. Tell her I said so.
You clearly can’t get out of the potlucks, but you can take steps to make them more bearable. Who says you have to hang out in the guys’ room? Leave them to talk about Clay Matthews (veteran Packers linebacker, FYI) while you laugh and gossip with the women. Something tells me the manly men won’t even notice you’re gone.
Do you have a question about life or love in Madison?
Write Tell All, 100 State St., Madison, WI 53703. Or email tellall@isthmus.com
