The concern about looks might be shorthand for a general realization that she’s getting older, heading toward forty, and thinking about what that represents. My best friend is a little older than me, and she started doing a lot of thinking about life when she hit her mid to late thirties and talking about all the things that would be cool to do in life that she was beginning to realize she’d never do.
It kind of perplexed me, so I’d just listen and offer that there were many good things she was doing with her current life, even if she wasn’t doing all those amazing and exciting sounding things. That never seemed to help, though, and I was at a loss for what to say. So I just listened while she talked about her dreams.
Then I reached my mid to late thirties and starting thinking about the same sorts of things. How there are so many things I want to do in life, and not enough life to do all of them. When you’re in your twenties, you’re ready to take on the the world and you have Big Plans. By the time you reach your late thirties, you realize that not everybody does Big Things, and most of those who do were well under way in their twenties. Yet here you are living an average life and getting older, and you never quite took over the universe the way you thought you would–life didn’t go according to plan.
There really isn’t anything anyone can do to fix this, so it’s good that you aren’t aiming to. My friend and I talked about it with each other and other close, trusted people, more because we were working our way in to accepting the realities of life. And that’s not to say that either I or my friend are unhappy with our lives, or emotionally unbalanced or in need of therapy or something. Just hitting the realization that you can’t do everything and taking stock of what our lives are, since they aren’t what either of us imagined they would be.
So I’m guessing your friend is simply doing that, and trying to come to terms with whatever it is she thought she’d do with her life by now that didn’t quite work out. Since it’s looks she’s talking about, I’m wondering if she’s feeling her biological clock ticking and realizing there’s not a lot of time left to have a baby if she wants one–and that if she’s not married, there’s only a certain amount of time left for finding a husband and getting down to business. But that might not be it–it could be something else entirely. She’s the only one who can tell you. You could try asking her if it’s just her looks or if it’s something more than that bothering her.
Regardless, there really isn’t a way to help her move through this more quickly. It’s just a transition she’s going through, and she’s talking to you about it because you care about her. Voicing the things you worry about to someone who cares is comforting and part of what helps you figure out how to change the things you can, and accept the things you can’t. So just be a friend and listen once in a while, and maybe share some of your own thoughts about getting older if you relate to any of what’s bothering her. I know my friend and I talk about that kind of stuff sometimes, simply because it feels better to know we aren’t alone in any of it. But mainly do all the other normal friend stuff so that the focus of the relationship is on doing all that friend stuff. In other words, live. Nothing cures all the regrets about what you will never do better than realizing there’s a hell of a lot of enjoyable stuff in whatever your reality is. And having friends is a big part of that.
