love out loud: friends know something you don’t know

Contrary to popular opinion, psychologists are not supposed to give advice, but rather reflect back to clients what they are already thinking (etc etc, but this is not the time nor the place to detail various psychotherapies).

As I am a student of psychology, I like to employ such strategies from time to time. As I am a student of psychology who currently has no intention of becoming a psychologist, I also feel free to violate them.

Like most of you (I hope), I have little tolerance for the mistreatment of my friends and the phrase, ‘get rid of them’ is never far from my lips when I hear of partners/pseudo-partners/whatevers being shits to my friends. I know that women’s magazines typically paint this as a terrible idea, just in case she keeps going out with him (with the assured heteronormative standards, of course) and then cuts you off because you don’t like him, but my feelings tend to be transparent anyway and I lose a quick battle if I try to conceal them.

But I digress.

All of that aside, I’m well aware that this blunt guidance (and it should be noted that it’s certainly not what I say at the first sign of relationship trouble, unless it’s a big ticket item like date rape or a weekend getaway with an ex-girlfriend) doesn’t always sit well with the people it is directed at. I occasionally hear whispers that they think I don’t know what I’m talking about. And they’re right.

No person has as much experience with a relationship than the people who are in it, but even a friend who has never met your partner has something you may not: your interests at heart.

Loving someone usually means you’re going to care about them at least as much as you care about yourself, and thus can’t (not to mention shouldn’t) consider your own interests irrespective of theirs. But your friends don’t have this aspect to dilute their concern for you.

The reason we get so defensive when someone tells us that a partner who they’ve never met is bad for us is that they’re only reflecting back to us EXACTLY what we’ve told them. It may be phrased differently, or they may have extrapolated something about the person, but it is nonetheless from information you have given them. You’ll protest that you only talk about the bad bits because no one wants to hear about your perfect life, but your friends know that if it bothers you enough to tell someone, it’s a problem, and sometimes those bits are bad enough or frequent enough that no good bits in between them could be a reprieve.

In their most extreme form, these friends won’t have a spare-your-feelings filter. One such friend of mine, Elizabeth Taylor, told me, ‘you can’t be serious’ upon meeting my last suitor; ‘He doesn’t respect you’ about the one before that, and, ‘He is such a douche’ came before him. Needless to say, she is not the person I go to when I need to be coddled, but the facts (ie. that I am single) would suggest that she’s usually right.

The problem for me in identifying that someone is behaving like a certifiable d-bag is that often my primary consideration, ahead of preserving my mental and emotional wellbeing, is keeping that person in my life. It’s a bad habit, and that’s why I need people like Elizabeth Taylor to keep their guard up for me.

It’s hard to hear that someone you really like might just not be a very nice person, but your friends are rarely telling you anything you don’t already know.

Unfortunately for most of you, Elizabeth Taylor is not in your life, but you probably do have someone to cast a critical eye over what’s going on in your relationship. Your decisions are ultimately yours, but if they suck, be grateful for the friends who will tell you as much, and maybe even point you in the right direction.