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3 days ago
5
My friend of 30-plus years has thrown her husband out and started a new relationship with someone I detest. I feel torn between this sense that she’s behaved appallingly towards her husband and the tenure of our friendship. I want to be honest with her about my feelings but feel almost too angry to do it in a constructive way. What do you advise?
Eleanor says: How much moral adjudication do we get to do of our friends? On the one hand you want to keep the bastards honest, and when you’re being a bastard, you want to be kept honest. On the other hand it does seem friendship involves keeping moral score of each other a little less than we ordinarily might.
I can see two scenarios here, and I’m not sure how much sharing your adjudications help in either.
In the first scenario, things aren’t exactly as they seem. You say your friend has suddenly dropped a good person for a bad one and behaved appallingly in the process. Of course, sometimes marriages aren’t the way they look, and there’s always the chance this was more rational than it seems. Any chance the good man was in fact a bad one? Something happened that you don’t know about? The detestable replacement rubs you the wrong way but is in some way better to her than the husband? We necessarily know less about other people’s relationships than they do, and if this decision is after all more rational than it seems, you might do some damage by acting as though you see her breakup with greater clarity than she does.
In the other scenario, things are exactly as they seem. She’s inexplicably chucked out the good for the bad. Annoyingly, that leaves us with exactly what it says on the tin: she’s being irrational. In that case, too, sharing your feelings risks backfiring, because if you’re correct that she’s suddenly turned cruel and stupid, something’s wrong – and whatever’s wrong is unlikely to right itself without the support of the people who bring out her better angels.
Sometimes we need other people to see the better version of ourselves if we’re going to live up to it. We go through irrational periods: after bereavement; in a midlife crisis; in the fog of inexplicable lust; we’ve all done stuff we look back at and cannot recognise (though yes, some of us do more damage than others). The trouble is, if the people around us act like the good in us has been extinguished, it can get pretty easy to believe them. This in turn can send you deeper into whatever the problem was.
If instead your loved ones hold on to their vision of you from when you weren’t being peculiar and hurting people, that can help you see yourself clearly again. The less your friend feels she has to come back to – the less esteem, less connection – the harder it may feel to return the version of her I take it you liked and valued for 30 years.
That’s to say: there are ways of being disappointed in her and wanting her to do better that involve seeing her at her best instead of telling her she’s at her worst.
I think there are two options here: either this was an irrational decision for her, or it wasn’t. In either case, criticising a person’s partner is a pretty good way to strain a friendship. And in either case, it may be that the best way to get the moral outcome isn’t by sharing your view of the moral score.
