“You should get a once-in-a-lifetime veto of a best friend’s boyfriend,” 30-year-old comedian and writer Maia Tassalani recently suggested on Subway Takes, the internet series where guests pitch controversial opinions to host Kareem Rahma. Tassalani’s video struck a chord with plenty of people: “Veto, but it has to be a panel of besties with supermajority,” joked one Instagram user. Another comment, which received over 14,800 likes, read: “Only women will understand the importance of this, as they’ve seen too many of their besties waste years of their lives in terrible relationships.”
Although the idea of a veto might be a bit strong, Tassalani’s video clearly speaks to a common experience. If you’ve ever had a friend, you’ve likely disliked at least one of their partners at some point: one YouGov survey found that nearly a third of people believe some of their friends would be better off without their significant other.
Anna*, a 31-year-old author in London, has come pretty close to a veto. She has directly told her best friend that she “hates” her current boyfriend, adding that there is “a special kind of pain reserved for watching your friends date idiots.” It wasn’t always like this: at the beginning of the relationship, Anna gave him the benefit of the doubt, but things changed when she heard that he had been “horrible” to her friend, triggering panic attacks, and had borrowed money from her because he was late on his rent.
In an effort to preserve the peace in their friendship, Anna says the two of them have now decided it is a no-go topic. “It was a harsh message but I told her: ‘I’m not entertaining this anymore. Obviously I will be there for you when you need me, but if you’re going to stay with him I don’t want to hear about it.’”
For many women, hypervigilance around a friend’s partner is often the result of having seen them get burned before. Although Tassalani is friends with many of her friends’ partners and even sees them as “family”, she has also permanently lost friends to toxic relationships. “I have lost brilliant, intelligent, clever, strong women to controlling men who have isolated them from their friends and their lives, and there’s a guttural rage that I have around that,” she says. “I can’t see another friend being subsumed by a weird man who doesn’t really have a life or any friends. Their girlfriends usually have big, fun and full lives which they have spent years cultivating, but they’re just expected to regress into recluses with these boyfriends.”
In the video, host Rahma pushes back on the idea that it’s gendered, saying the veto should work on girlfriends too. But like many women call out in the comments, he’s missing the point. Although concerns should, of course, flow across genders, there is often more urgency for women “because of the likelihood of violence, abuse or other harm,” says psychotherapist and author Eloise Allexia. In this case, she emphasises, it’s important to voice concerns.
“I have lost brilliant, intelligent, clever, strong women to controlling men who have isolated them from their friends and their lives”
But beyond that, are there ever more innocuous grey areas that are still grounds for piping up? What if all they talk about is crypto, their Instagram is full of gym selfies, or the amount of hair product they use is an ick? While these things are objectively low on the sliding scale of offence, the point is it can feel hard to take zero action when you have a strong feeling someone might not be good enough for a loved one. Increasingly, the internet’s view has become a one-track echo chamber touting something akin to a veto: dump him.
There’s a lot of dating doomerism out there at the moment. Alongside viral think pieces such as “Is having a boyfriend embarrassing?”, videos titled “Reasons to dump him 101”, “Why dumping him is a win-win situation” and hashtags such as #dumphim have millions of views on social media. It’s not uncommon to see strangers directly commenting “girl, leave him or don’t come crying to us” on couples content. Entertaining or not, social media has encouraged a collective oversharing and simultaneous policing of other people’s love lives. This often extends to people we know IRL.
Allexia says that this isn’t always a bad thing, as social media often legitimises and provides language for things we might have already been thinking or feeling. “For example, we might have had the impulse to tell our friend they’re too good for their partner, but a hashtag allows us to join in a bigger movement, find a sense of solidarity and community with others, and express ourselves in a simple, effective – although somewhat generalised – way.” The fact is, there’s a valid reason women exercise caution, and that is because the stakes are high and the horror stories are rife.
Elise, a 24-year-old account manager in Manchester, admits that she had “crazy rose-tinted lenses on” when her friends finally suggested to her that her then-partner might not be the greatest match for her. To this day, she wishes she had listened sooner than she did. “I sacrificed a lot for a relationship that was undeniably wrong: the ex had been a serial cheat, there were warning signs of drug addiction that I ignored, and [signs that he was] plainly just disliking me,” she says.
Elise didn’t want to admit her friends had been right the whole time after the amount of effort she had put into making it work. “It felt too embarrassing that they were right and I’d just wasted a whole lot of my time, money and happiness on a failed relationship. I was lucky that once it had ended and I found out all the information about the cheating, they were supportive and didn’t make me feel like a fool for staying with him; they just wanted to pick me back up at the end of it.”
It’s easy to see how commenting on a partner can get people’s backs up. Obviously, most of us like (if not love) our partners, and can bristle at the suggestion that they’re not right for us – and, in some cases, struggle to see that this is really the case. Others might perceive feedback as infantilising or patronising: not only can it sabotage the friendship, but it can also feel like a personal attack, says Allexia. “We can interpret our choice of partner as saying something about us – what we value, our sense of self, what we find attractive,” she says. “It doesn’t just imply that we make poor relationship choices, but it can also imply that there’s something wrong with us for making this ‘bad’ choice.”
Veto or not, Tassalini believes being able to raise concerns is essential to a lasting friendship. “We’ve mistaken friendships as places that need to be unconditionally supportive, but I think being an agreeable friend and being a supportive friend are completely different things,” she says. “I think if we really want friendships that last a lifetime, they will challenge us, be confronting and force us to grow. We can’t just expect blind support.”
Ultimately, approach with understanding and tactful communication rather than judgement. Go gung-ho on serious red flags, but beyond that, it’s probably best to let your friends make their own minds up, despite what social media might be telling you. Furthermore, it’s about picking your battles, says Tassalini. “When I was younger, and I thought of my friends’ future boyfriends, I thought I was going to get a bonus best friend,” she says. “Now that I’m older, the standards have changed so much that if a guy is good to my friend and they’re not actively evil, that’s a win. I am kissing their feet. That’s all I care about.”
*Name has been changed