Three Couples and an Unlikely Catalyst for Intimacy

It’s hard to make friends as an adult. 

For instance, this guy I know, he moves to a new city. He’s just started freelancing and he has a small child. His wife works for this hip, up-and-coming creative agency; so he stays home, answering emails during naptime, tapping away at his work at the kitchen counter, and developing back pain day after day. Eventually, he meets his wife’s work friends but they don’t hit it off. Then he loses his only real client. He writes a book; he sits in front of the computer developing shoulder pain and neck pain. He runs so much his shins hurt. He releases the book to the accolade of the insects in the yard. He drinks too much. He lies on the living room floor in the dark between half-unpacked cardboard boxes listening to the comfortable breathing of the sleeping household and he realizes something he’s too embarrassed to put into words; he realizes he’s lonely.

Let’s say that guy is me. Some time ago.

I know how hard it is to make friends as an adult. As kids, it was a matter of finding a playground or a sports field or an empty lot. We engaged with our peers through play. Perhaps that’s the secret. Adults, on the other hand, so often engage with their peers through the medium of work. And work is a different beast altogether.

Eventually, I develop acquaintances in my new city, as one does, but friendship––that ineffable, qualitative difference in intimacy––you don’t just come by that; it has to be cultivated. 

So that’s what I try to do; I start a tabletop gaming group. Because I’m a nerd. I invite guys I’m acquainted with to come and play every other week or so. Some come; some don’t. Some keep coming; some don’t. We play Dominion, Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne, Arkham Horror, Descent––you know, nerd stuff. When the reviews come in that Dungeons & Dragons, fifth edition isn’t all that bad, the old-school roleplaying game nerds at the table decide it’s time to get back into the “hobby.” This prospect excites me to my very, nerdy core. 

These same old-school RPG nerds bring me into the fold; as a child of the Satanic Panic of the nineteen-eighties and nineties, I had never played D&D before. Blake and I have that in common; we’re the two guys at the table with a religious upbringing; we struggle to grasp D&D’s complex rule system due to our lack of experience with it. He and I have something else in common as well: our wives work together––a fact that would later become a thing in a big way.

We play D&D with a certain regularity, adventuring through the Forgotten Realms, busting up doomsday cults over micro-brews and take out. I get my own dice set, buy pricey manuals, tell dumb stories about my in-game character trying to punch a water mage but getting his ass kicked instead. All of this my wife, Meg, observes with, at best, a mixture of bemusement and indifference and at worst a tinge of annoyance. But the guys I play with, they become some of the best friends I’ve ever had. Like kids, we’re just playing together. 

When you structure your social life around an activity of extreme insularity––such as a game where grown-ups play make-pretend with dice––it can alienate you from loved ones with no experience of that activity. An idea unbidden and unwanted begins to itch at the back of my skull, a growing sense that Meg and I are starting to live quite separate lives. She has serious work and serious work friends, strict deadlines, and demands for deliverables on the cutting edge of what it means to be cool. Meanwhile, my work and social life are consumed with the fictional. I’m writing comics, fantasy novels, and pulpy short fiction. Even my meager client work seems to veer toward the nerdy. And right at the end of the week, I’m holed up in the basement till well after midnight with my weird dork friends, playing Dungeons & Dragons. 

It seems Blake is experiencing a similar sense of alienation from his spouse. To resolve this, he asks his wife, Nicole, for a special birthday gift. I wasn’t there, but this is how I imagine that conversation going:

Nicole: Is there something special you want me to do for your birthday?

Blake: Yes. I’d like you to play Dungeons & Dragons with me.

Nicole: I’ll literally do anything. Anything you want. Is that still your answer?

Blake: ...Yes?

So Blake asks me to get Meg on board and he somehow convinces another couple, Nich and Lindsay, to join the game. The plan is to play one game on one night, just so our wives can get a sense of what Dungeons & Dragons is like. Blake wants me to be the Dungeon Master.

Okay. Shit. Some of you don’t know what that means. “Dungeon Master” sounds kinky but it’s not. Like really, not. Here’s how the game works: it’s sort of a co-operative storytelling game where most of the players are characters in an adventure story, heroes in a medieval fantasy world like The Lord of the Rings or A Game of Thrones. They explore dungeons and fight monsters––but rarely dragons. One player acts as the Dungeon Master, the arbiter of the fiction who asks the other players to roll their dice when they want to try something difficult or dangerous. The Dungeon Master directs the action and presents obstacles for the adventurers to overcome. There’s a lot of pressure on the Dungeon Master. Everyone else can just show up to the game and play, but the Dungeon Master has to make time-consuming preparations beforehand. If no one has fun, it’s usually the Dungeon Master’s fault.

I’ve never been a Dungeon Master before and this is going to be a tough crowd. We are a living stereotype of the gaming community: three dudes whose love of Dungeons & Dragons is inversely proportional to our wives’ indifference to the game. In the weeks leading up to the one-off game night, other D&D friends ask me how I expect it to go. “Terrible,” I say. “Our wives don’t really want to play, they’re going to be bored and I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.” In an effort to make the on-ramping process more streamlined for the apathetic new players, Blake takes it upon himself to create character sheets for each of the three female players. 

Oh, shit again. Some of you don’t know what that means. Each player––other than the Dungeon Master, of course––has to fill out a character sheet prior to playing. It describes the fictional character’s attributes––their strengths, and weaknesses––with numerical values. That’s right: numbers. If that sounds weird, counterintuitive, and needlessly complicated to you, there’s a reason for that; it’s weird, counterintuitive, and needlessly complicated. It sucks for new players who actually want to try the game, but for our wives, it would have been a deal-breaker. That’s why Blake did the work for them.

An additional hurdle we need to overcome is articulated by Blake’s wife Nicole. She requests that the game not involve anything like the scenes depicted in the Lord of the Rings films where Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas battle waves of orcs and goblins with great manly feats of manliness while barreling through a dark cavern deep underground; this kind of thing, she says, is just not interesting to her. Totally understandable. A reasonable thing to dislike. On the other hand––and I haven’t done the math––but I’d estimate that 95% of D&D’s 300+ page player’s handbook consists mainly of rules concerning how to battle waves of orcs and goblins with great manly feats of manliness while barreling through a dark cavern deep underground. Maybe as high as 97%. Again, I haven’t done the math. With this in mind, Blake digs up a short adventure module about exploring a haunted house. (Oh shit, thrice. Some of you might not know what an “adventure module” is––it’s just, like, a story guide for the Dungeon Master to follow.) The upshot is that the players battle ghouls instead of orcs. So, that’s different. Problem solved.

On the night of the game, we all secure childcare and arrive at Nich and Lindsay’s home with way too much junk food and alcohol. We sit down at a table, pass out character sheets and dice to the newcomers and I say, “Let’s go around the table and introduce your characters.”

A hand is raised. “What does that mean?”

“You know. What’s your name and class and all that.”

Another hand. “For our characters?”

“Yes. I know your name. I’m married to you.”

Hand. “They’re supposed to have names?”

We’re off to a poor start. This is going to be a long night.

I begin the story: 

The adventurers are beckoned by two creepy children to enter a creepy house in a creepy village in order to slay a monster in the creepy basement.

I expect eye rolls at the clichéd setup, but Nicole’s brow skews with concern for the imperiled children. Inside the house, Meg, having finally examined her character sheet, realizes she has thieving skills and decides to raid the cupboard for silver. Lindsay expresses genuine satisfaction at rolling dice to attack a haunted suit of armor menacing them; she comes up with a battle plan and starts directing the other players. Hours pass and they don’t seem to want it to wrap it up.

But it’s getting late. They haven’t slain (or even found) the monster in the basement yet. Babysitters must be relieved; the game must come to a close. For a moment I toy with the idea of fast-forwarding the narrative to the end. But something strange has happened. Improbably, our wives are engaged with the fiction, such that their actions have been propelling the story forward. Speculation concerning the conclusion of the narrative is high. Lindsay makes an earnest plan of action for what to do next. So I let it play out a little longer: 

They open a door leading to the creepy house’s abandoned nursery, where a woman stands with her back to them, looking over the crib; the woman turns revealing the pale visage of a wrathful specter. 

And then, channeling Peter Falke in The Princess Bride, I say “It’s getting late. Let’s stop here tonight and plan on finishing up another time.”

I am met with anger, then resignation. A quiet falls on the table as if everyone present has something to say but is pondering how to say it. Then, one of our wives, I honestly can’t recall which, speaks up, “You know, we have to keep doing this right?” Notice, she does not say, “That was fun.” or “I enjoyed myself.” She just expresses a sentiment that this silly make-pretend game is something she needs in her life––something we all need. The rest of the table concurs.

That’s how Dungeons and Datenight begins.

We play every month. That first winter, all three families decide to rent a house in the mountains so we can play two nights in a row. On the third day, there’s a modest amount of ice on the roads so we stay an extra night and play some more. We do it again in the summer. Our kids get along together; we all decide these family retreats need to be a biannual event––every winter, every summer. 

What was once insular and alienating, has expanded to encircle three families, to bind them together. Meg and Nicole discuss their characters at work and every week all three of the wives get together to watch reality television. We all genuinely enjoy each other’s company. We’re having fun. But friendship isn’t just about the good times, is it? Hardship is always just around the corner.

It turns out the hip, up-and-coming creative agency Meg and Nicole work for has become a hip, crashing-and-burning creative agency. There are rounds of layoffs. Meg and Nicole are safe, but it’s stressful. They make plans to get drinks after work, to blow off steam, and commiserate about the crazy times. Then Meg learns there will be another round of layoffs; now Nicole is on the chopping block. Meg tries to convince her bosses that they need to keep Nicole on, but deep down, she knows if they could keep Nicole on they would. She wants to tell Nicole what’s coming, but she can’t; the details have to be worked out first, and that won’t happen until the day after their drink date.

So now Meg has to decide: does she go to drinks with her friend and sit there across a cocktail table and say nothing? Instead, she cancels the date and negotiates a severance package for her friend before spending the evening at home in tears. 

Imagine the betrayal Nicole feels the next day when she is laid off without warning. By all appearances, her friend bailed on her because she didn’t have the decency to look her in the eyes and tell her the truth. 

This should have been the end of that friendship; after all, work friends come and go. But Nicole and Meg had spent the last couple of years outside of work, in their spare time, telling each other a story in which they were heroines––sisters even––striving together to save the world from evil. There’s a vulnerability that goes along with playing with another person. You’re exploring your values together, pushing and pulling in both subtle and overt ways to understand the picture in each other’s head, to come to terms in a way that most people don’t bother to do with anyone. I believe it is this that creates the context which allows Meg and Nicole to see each other’s side of their conflict, to trust in each other’s character, to apologize, to forgive. It is difficult and it takes time, but their friendship is closer now than before. 

And so Dungeons and Datenight survives. 

When it comes to her job at the creative agency, Meg goes down with the ship. She fought for months to save that company and by the time it closes shop, there are no severance packages to give out. My freelance gigs, I am ashamed to admit, can’t keep our family afloat. So when she gets a job offer in another city, she takes it. 

We move again. But this time it’s different. We have Dungeons and Datenight; we live close enough that every month we can stay with our friends and play. Twice a year––for the last, what is it, going on five years!––we take that summer and winter retreat.

Like it has for most everyone reading this, hard times have returned for our little friend group––pandemic, more job losses. But Dungeons and Datenight continues amidst the chaos. We play remotely, and more often. Life can still be lonely at times. In those moments, we tell each other stories about what we value and strive for, we open up our heads and hearts to each other; we roll dice and pull our friends closer.