Prudie chats with Lizzie O’Leary, host of What Next: TBD, about a friend who can’t take it anymore.
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Dear Prudence,
My best friend needs to leave her husband. He’s not abusive, but they don’t communicate, they don’t have sex, and she’s miserable all the time. She’s been married 10 years, and it’s been the same story the entire time. She wants to leave but she’s scared. She goes back and forth all the time on: Maybe he’ll change. Maybe she needs to work harder to change him. Maybe she needs to adjust her attitude and then she will be happy with him. I have been able to put up with this for 10 years somehow, but in the last year, things have escalated in a major way.
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And it has become unbearable for me to listen to her any longer. We don’t live in the same city and we speak on the phone a few times a week and text throughout the week. She really is my best friend and I care about her a lot. But I cannot spend any more time listening to her wonder about her husband. I try to be very supportive and have at times told her what I really think: “You will leave him when you’re ready,” is about as explicit as I’ve gotten. I am considering telling her that I can’t talk about her marriage with her anymore. But that seems so harsh. Is it?
—Just Leave
Jenée Desmond-Harris: This is a pretty common theme when it comes to the letters we receive: “My friend is making poor choices in life and won’t stop complaining and I can’t take it anymore.” I have to admit that I don’t think I have a consistent response because I have two beliefs that can be at odds with each other: 1) Being a good friend means putting up with this stuff because we’re all going to go through periods of making poor choices at some point, and we all have our annoying qualities and, 2) If you’re this deeply bothered, it might mean you really don’t like the friend that much, and should just let the relationship fade.
Which of these I focus on usually depends on what I can intuit about how much the letter writer actually values the friendship with the exhausting complainer. Here, it sounds like she means a lot to her and this relationship is worth working on.
Lizzie O’Leary: Yeah, I mean, if this is truly your best friend and you want to be in this friendship for life, it does require a decent degree of sucking it up and listening to the complaints. However! I also think that if someone is truly one of your ride or dies, you can actually say “hey, we have talked about your unhappiness with Beethoven (idk, I have been listening to a lot of classical music) a lot lately, and it’s really difficult to see you in such pain, and it’s hard for me to keep talking about it with you.” I think when someone is in an unhappy relationship that is slowly boiling them alive, they may not realize how much emotional bandwidth they are taking up. You can gently reflect that back to them. It’s a really tricky thing when the subject of your conversation is someone’s spouse, because you run the risk that they get offended and/or don’t confide in you anymore. But hey, if it is truly unbearable to you, you can say a softer version of that!
Jenée: I don’t want to suggest that there’s anything wrong with the letter writer for being tired of hearing the same complaints and seeing no action over a long period of time, but I wonder if it’s worth asking: What feelings exactly does the situation bring up for you? Is it anger (and if so, could that be taken down a notch by trying to cultivate more empathy or detachment from the situation)? Is it fear that your friend will never be happy? Is it sadness about the amount of space the topic is taking up in your relationship? Resentment that she’s not able to be there for you because she’s preoccupied? I don’t know exactly what to do with that information, but it feels to me like it would be valuable to be able to articulate it when you explain what’s going on.
Lizzie: Oh man you are right! I might want to add one other emotion: jealousy. Not jealousy of your friend’s husband. But there is a specific kind of jealousy that comes from watching someone you love have their light dimmed by a crappy relationship. It’s a combination of helplessness, strange resentment at the friend for being in this position, anger at the partner, and truly loving them and wanting the best for them. It’s a horrible feeling.
Look, LW, there is always the possibility, maybe even probability, that your friend is never going to do anything about this. Which means that cultivating detachment is self-protective too. You can’t be a dumping ground for these feelings forever, because it will erode your friendship. But you can try to steer your friendship to non-husband topics, to mutual activities, and even to, uh, only talking on the phone once a week so you have a bit more emotional breathing room.
Jenée: It’s really true that the friend might never make a change. It’s also true that she might finally get divorced and then have a series of crappy relationships that are just as tough to hear about. So while I think a gentle confrontation is okay, your idea to add enjoyable and non-aggravating conversation topics to dilute the stuff about marital problems is probably the best long-term plan.