I vote for: talk about how her behavior affects the professional responsibilities. Anything else is none of your business unless she clearly and specifically asks for your advice or assistance.
And, FTR, I agree, he sounds like a controlling, manipulative, abusing douchebag. Her problem. Not yours.
You can post on a Kindle? In Africa? Do you have to have a special Kindle?
Regarding the OP, leave it alone. My father used to say, “A woman convinced against her will is of the same opinion still”. And if you do convince her she’s unhappy with him, and her life doesn’t become full of rainbows and sparkles, you’ll be the bad guy, and she’ll always think how great her life would’ve been if that co-worker hadn’t convinced her not to marry her soulmate.
StG
I’m going to go against the chorus here and say that I don’t think it’s all that bad an idea to say something. I went out with a guy years ago who had a lot in common with what you’re describing about this guy. And I can say that once I finally got out of the relationship, and my head was clear and I could look back and see what a douche he was, I felt a little hurt that nobody had *told *me! My family and my friends all confessed to me later that they were concerned, they could see what he was. But they didn’t feel it was their place to say anything–my mother even said she was afraid if she said anything I would just cling to him more, which is ridiculous–I’ve never had that kind of relationship with her, and I’ve always had a lot of respect for her opinion, but I digress…
You know the thing that set me on the path to “recovery?” One of my girlfriends finally said something. It wasn’t a big long lecture or anything, just a short comment or two. I was talking to her after one of my many fights with this guy, telling her all about it, and I said, “I just don’t like the person I become when I’m around him.” She said, “Listen to yourself! What you just said…don’t you think that maybe that’s a huge sign that this relationship is not healthy?”
She made me stop and think. And even though it took me several months to finally detangle myself from this guy (he really did a number on my head), I can say that that was the moment I started to realize what was going on and that I needed to get out.
Now, my situation was a bit different from yours in that this girlfriend is someone I’ve been friends with since we were 12 (I’m 35 now), the kind of person that really is more family than friend. It doesn’t sound like you have that kind of relationship with this girl. Also, it sounds like there are cultural differences at work.
But just speaking as someone who’s been there, I think you should say something. Doesn’t have to be a lot, just some well-placed comments. And use a lot of “I” statements. “I’ve noticed that you’ve been missing stuff…” “I worry that maybe you’re accepting this guy because you think you should, not because you really want to, etc.” I actually think the fact that you’re not so close is a bonus–maybe it will make it easier for her to have an open mind about it. And if I’m wrong, you haven’t lost a dear, lifelong friend.
Just my two cents. Worth what you paid for them!
It’s tough, kid, but that’s life.
Years ago a woman I considered one of my closest friends was in a situation that sounds a lot like the OP’s colleague. Fast forward to the present, and there’s every sign that her marriage turned out even more twisted and miserable than I had feared. Yet when I finally met up with this lady, she made it very clear that that (A) she had absolutely no regrets (at least as far as I was concerned) and (B) she still really resented my trying to butt into her business over a decade ago.
I’ve been in a similar situation myself and while I, too, was a bit hurt that nobody said anything to me, I also realized that I might have bent over backwards justifying his behavior so I could feel okay about myself staying with him. What tipped the scales for me was a simple look at just the right moment. I was trapped in a car with several friends and the controlling BF was on the phone screaming at me because I’d gone to the beach with my friends instead of staying in town doing nothing with him. As I hung up the phone, not crying but wanting to, I caught the eye of my BFF’s nephew. He gave me this look of abject pity, as if his eyes were saying, “I’m so sorry you’re putting up with this douchebag; you deserve so much better.”
And I got mad. Really mad that one of my beloved friends pitied me because I couldn’t see I was in a crappy relationship. I don’t want my friends’ pity. I don’t even want to be in a relationship that makes my friends feel sorry for me. I was humiliated!
Right after that, I started digging into why that made me so pissed off and that led me to what I was going to do about it: DTMFA. Which I did. That friend never said a word. Until way later, he told me he was glad I’d dumped the douchebag. I asked why he hadn’t said anything. He said, “Well, it was none of my business.”
Sometimes, if you’re really, really close, and you have that kind of open, honest friendship, a friend can really pull you out of the fire with a couple of well-timed comments. If you can make one comment, plant a seed, and then STOP and shut up about it, she might be able to hear you.
And she might want to please her parents so badly that you only cause more cognitive dissonance and she ends up projecting her bad feelings on to you. So you may just be shooting yourself in the foot and some people have to learn the hard way. Or you may just be saving some random girl from a lifetime of misery. IMO, you’re not really close enough to this girl for it to be appropriate for you to say anything… unless she specifically asks for your opinion or advice. If anything, try open-ended questions that get her thinking, vis a vis the Socratic Method. Some good ones that have worked on me:
•How do you know if someone loves you? How do you know if BF loves you?
•Aside from physicalities, name one thing you really love about BF. Name one thing you don’t like about BF. Why?
• [Tell a story about someone treating you disrespectfully] How do you get someone to treat you with respect? What does that mean, how does a person show respect for another?
• What is important to have in a marriage? Do you think it’s about compatibility, shared values, common religion…? What’s a dealbreaker for you? What’s a dealbreaker for him?
Excellent post, Martin Hyde.
even sven, I think you are imposing your Western values on this woman. Everything you say here glorifies her potential independence and freedom. Not everybody ranks these as their most treasured values. Maybe she’s not thrilled about her prospects for the future, and maybe that isn’t really necessary for her to derive deep, personal satisfaction out of life. I realize that may be a hard concept to grasp but not everybody needs to fulfill their own desires in order to achieve happiness. This is especially true in cultures that value interdependence and community. I feel like you must know this given all your travel experience, and I’m honestly surprised by some of the things you’ve written here.
I somewhat get where you’re coming from. One of my closest friends in grad school was from Taiwan. Being in the United States confused her, because by attending school here a part of her had embraced the values of independence and self-exploration - this was her dream, her personal dream. A part of her envied the freedom we feel as Americans to serve our own needs first. And she did grow and begin to make some choices based on what she wanted. But once she finished school she returned as a primary caretaker of her family, to do her duty. She found a way to embrace self-exploration within the context of her own culture. I didn’t always understand her reasons for making the choices she did, but I honored them, because I have no idea what it’s like in her culture and I can’t pretend to. Likewise she respects my choices, even though she may not understand. As an adult she makes life decisions as she sees fit and so do I and that is the basis of a real friendship.
More than that, I think the real issue is you feel like she’s not pulling her weight but you don’t want to blame her for whatever’s going on with her right now. That’s fine. You can talk to her about her responsibilities on the project without judging her for her behavior. It is totally acceptable for you to tell her that her frequent unreliability is problematic and you don’t feel like she’s committing herself to the experience. You can’t force her to enjoy it but you it is totally reasonable to expect that she fulfill her responsibilities.
Well, what could they have said earlier on that you would have listened to? I mean, you wouldn’t even listen to yourself. Your heart was obviously trying to tell you what was going on–you were unhappy and didn’t like the person you were when you were with this guy. For a long time, it sounds like. And you wouldn’t listen to it. What could they have said that you wouldn’t have ignored or pooh-poohed away just like you did the messages from yourself?
You heard what your friend was saying because you were finally ready to hear it. You had already started to listen to yourself a bit–the message had solidified in your mind enough for you to articulate it to someone else. And all she really said was to listen to yourself. If you hadn’t been ready to hear, it would have run in one ear and out the other just like all the messages from within had been doing up till then. Or pissed you off that she was all up in your business talking shit about something she doesn’t truly understand.
Some people are never ready to hear, no matter how blatantly obvious it is. I have a friend who is married to a guy a whole lot worse than the one in the OP. The time I road-tripped to Vegas with her, she had to call him every single time we stopped and at least once a day while we were in Vegas so they could spend an hour or two having stupid arguments about utter bullshit. The week before the wedding, she began vomiting from stress and wound up in the ER for dehydration on the night of his bachelor party. When someone finally got hold of this guy to tell him his fiancee was in the ER, he not only didn’t come to check on her or take her home, he got pissed off that they were bothering him during his special night. We all told her at multiple points that he was a total douchenozzle and she should DTMFA, and she plowed right on ahead.
I really don’t think this is a cultural thing. Quick courtship and relatively early marriage is not the norm for her social set or her family- she’s said her family is uncomfortable with the situation. Nor does it seem to be what she wants. She has expressed over and over that she is uncomfortable with how fast this is progressing and the level of commitment she is being asked for.
Anyway, Asians are not a hive mind. Some are devoted to family above all else. Others run away from home at 16 and would rather turn tricks than go home. Some are eager for security. Others jump on the chance to move to the frontier. Just like in our culture, you find the whole range of personalities and desires. Culture affects what they can realistically do with those desires and how their energy gets channeled.
But this idea that Asians women have no desire for personal satisfaction is bullshit. Some do, some don’t. Those that do are just as pissed off when forced in to a situation that they don’t like as you or I would be. They don’t take a lot of comfort in the fact that their lack of options is culturally appropriate.
My purpose in saying something would not be to try to break them up or anything. It’d be more that she seems unsure of things and questioning her own perceptions, and if hers match up with mine she’d have some confirmation that she’s not crazy, immature or ungrateful in feeling how she does.
If that’s the case, take her out for some kind of girls’ night out and get her drunk. She might open up on what’s really going on, and maybe just hearing herself saying it out loud is all she needs.
You can never tell somebody something that they’re not already telling themselves.
That’s not what I said.
You mentioned that she said you didn’t understand about ‘‘cultural pressures’’ so I’m not sure why her culture is not relevant in this case. Whether she does it for cultural reasons or personal satisfaction or whatever is beside the point, I guess. The point is that it’s her decision to make. It’s not like rushing a relationship is some exclusively Asian concept or anything.
Well, I don’t see any harm in doing this. If she says something negative about it, I’m sure it would be appropriate to say, “You really seem unsure about this decision,” and help her explore her feelings there. I don’t think that’s overly nosy/intrusive, I think that’s just being a friend.
I guess I conceptualized this conversation already taking place and her not being receptive to it. Have you said anything at all to her other than, “Uh-huh. That’s nice,” when she brings this stuff up?
The reason why I emphasize travel is because we are travelling.
Packing up and moving to an African village where you know nobody (I was a late addition to the project) just doesn’t seem like the actions of someone who isn’t at all interested in that sort of thing. she surely wanted something out of this when she made tis decision. You don’t move to Africa accidently.
I don’t have any opinion on people who want to play World of Warcraft all day. I do not think these people should neccessarily spend a summer in Africa. But if you come to Africa and spend all day playing World of Warcraft and getting all mopey because it’s laggy and you miss the raid times…it just seems like a waste. And if your guild is giving you all kinds of prssure to put in more hours and raid instead of going on safari, it starts to seem like maybe that guild desn’t really have you best interests in mind.
If someone you loved was about to go on the first and likely only safari of their lives, would’t you not want them to miss that? If someone you loved was in a career related meeting, wouldn’t you volunteer to call them back afterwards? Wouldn’t you want them to make the most out of a temporary situation? I mean, if your BFF was studying abroad and having a tough time, wouldn’t you encourage them to get out there rather than spend all day talking to you?
Am I really that confused about what love means? Doesn’t it mean wanting the best for someone? As in, not doing stuff that makes them sleep till noon every day?
The reason I havn’t said anything is that I’m just not that great with girlfriends. I tend to be more like a guy with friends, focusing on activities and shared interests and not so much into discussing feelings. I show affection and solidarity with friends through actions better than words- if someone is hurt over a breakup I’m the one to take them dancing or shopping, not the one to stay up all night talking to.
World of Warcraft? Huh?
It’s a metaphor. I think.
First, discuss how her actions are affecting the job you are both doing. Try to let her know that you think she’s not doing her part. It sounds like the situation is difficult for both of you. Talk about “team building”–although I wouldn’t blame you for avoiding that particular phrase.
As somebody planning to work in the same field, talk to her about career plans. What’s in your future? Try to encourage her to think about hers–what does she really want to do?
What does he think about her plans? Catholics have to go through pre-marital counseling to ensure that both partners know what they’re getting into. I knew an Indian lady at work who had an “arranged” marriage. (They were both adult professionals ready for marriage, not children forced into the match.) Their families introduced them but they had time to talk about things & decide whether they were right for each other. No matter her culture, she has a right to consider what *she *wants from her life.
Don’t go into detail about the relationship. Even though he does sound like an asshole.
My sister dated a guy kind of like this. I would tell her that she could do better than this, that it wasn’t normal, when she visited me for a week, to spend hours every day on epic phone battles with him from which she emerged crying and desperately unhappy. (About totally stupid things. And it wasn’t all his fault – she did an equal amount of pushing his buttons – they were just very bad together.)
I don’t know how much she listened to me. She told me later that she thought she couldn’t do better than their relationship, that it was normal or at least normal for her. (She had some fairly severe self-esteem issues at the time. I’m suspecting your friend does as well.) The only thing I did say that seemed to make an impact was that I said that if they were going to get married that they needed to do premarital counseling and that any guy who didn’t agree to premarital counseling clearly shouldn’t be getting married.
But eventually it came out that he wanted her to move across the country with him without making a commitment to her, and that was her last straw. I suppose I’ll never know how much my comments led to that being the last straw, but I think the fact that she knew I thought he wasn’t good for her counted for something, even if it took four years to percolate through her system.
Probably you and boyfriend have radically different opinions about what is best for this woman. For all you know, she may have been telling him how she has discovered she hates Africa and thinks the entire intern ship was a big mistake. He may think she is utterly miserable in Africa and calling her all the time is his way of helping her out in difficult situation (Reminding her that there is a world of modern restaurants, fast cars, and state of the art electronic entertainment waiting for her the day she returns). You may think a safari is a wonderful opportunity. Someone else might perfer watching paint dry instead of going on a safari.
The OP did say that the safari had been the roommate’s idea.
I think raspberry hunter is right - a few girls I know have also had that attitude of “I’ll never be able to do better so I might as well stick with this.” Her family may not be pressuring her, but being a spinster in an Asian society is tough no matter how supporting your family is.
I’m still curious about the answer to this question:
What, exactly, have you said to her about this relationship, and how has she received it?
[QUOTE=even sven]
She has said already (when I said WTF to the idea that the good part of her life is over) that I don’t understand the cultural expectations she has and deals with
[/QUOTE]
Do you see where I got the idea that culture might have something to do with it?
When she said this, what was the context of that conversation? Did she talk about those cultural pressures at all in specific and did you say anything in return?
Yeah, but ideas can change when you are confronted with the physical reality. For years I said I wanted to go white water rafting. You know, down the lovely rivers in the little boat or canoe (I’m still not sure what correct water vehicle is called). Then, on a trip, my husband started making arrangements for us to do that (renting equipment, mapping out a course). I remember looking at the river, looking at pictures of people on parts of the river, feeling absolutely terrified (and having a combination of disaster movie/Deliverance nightmares), and making up an excuse for why we couldn’t go on the rafting trip.