I was in good humor, until two posters in a row misspelled my user name. Now it’s time for fisticuffs.
Yours, Sattua
(Ph.D. in linguistics, native speaker, ergo always right!)
Hey, I said I was a nitpicky GRAMMAR jerk, not a nitpicky SPELLING jerk. Even though the original debate was actually over spelling and not grammar. That’s an area I’m not at liberty to go into, because it’s really more suited for a nitpicky SEMANTICS jerk.
Ah, the hell with it. I challenge thee to a dool! Pistulz at Don!
Are you sure Don is okay with that?
Seriously though, Jester (and I typed all those extra vowels just for you), you recognize that there’s a difference between a woman being pretty and a woman being slutty? Right?
Sattua, maybe I missed it in your OP, but has she actually TOLD you that she wants a boyfriend? Because I know lots of women who sleep with married men, and it’s not because they think he’ll leave her, it’s because they can count on him NOT to. If you want the perks of a boyfriend without all the pain in the ass dirty socks laying around part of it, married men can be the way to go.
Is it possible that she actually knows exactly what she’s doing, and it’s YOU who thinks her life needs an upgrade?
Settua is an asshole? I don’t think her advice is so unreasonable. Good golly, I forgot how so many people on this board are some type of secular-gnostic hybrid who believe that being asked to look nice in public is akin to being called a bad person. Mild, reasonable requests like “How about you wear some make-up from time to time? Just try it. I’m not saying you have to like it or do it often,” almost always arouse a cry of “How dare you judge me?! Everyone is different, so fuck you!” Nobody is forcing you to dress well. Hell, I know I personally dress horribly most of the time. What Settua is saying is that looking well can help get a SO, which the lack of seems to be a problem for said friend. Amazingly, it does work.
In any case, it sounds like 2 and 3 are much larger issues anyway. The first issue is just more fun to squabble about. It’s a perennial board favorite. Woohoo~ In closing, my only advice is that Sattua should also be saying these things directly to her girlfriend. Screw waiting for her to ask. That might never happen.
As a post-script, if your friend is anything like people I’ve personally known, the best advice is to tell her to love herself and stop giving a shit what other people think. You can’t change her. If she likes being a dark, cranky, turtle-necky person (no offense to turtle-neck lovers out there), then she’ll eventually find somebody that wants that in a woman. If she wants to change into something brighter, she will have to love herself first in order to do that. Giving somebody advice on how to find a SO by telling them to change themself is often like asking an elephant to eat peanuts without using its trunk.
Oh, absolutely. I wasn’t commenting on the disparity to get at you, really. It was more about my expectations as I read the thread: Point One made me assume something about how the rest of the OP would go, and Point Two pretty effectively reversed that in a way that I found funny (but not necessarily incongruous). I think it was you using the word “amish” as a descriptor and then moving right to “Please stop sleeping with married men and sailors” that put it over the top, humor-wise. Opposite ends of the spectrum and all.
slight hijack
I am emphatically NOT one of those people, but saying “Put some makeup on” is different than saying “Iron your shirt”, because it only applies to women, and the implication is that because you happen to be a woman, you’re unadorned face is unacceptable. Even as a woman who is greeted by name at her local Sephora, I call bullshit.
/hijack
DianaG, her behavior sure does suggest that she doesn’t actually want a committed relationship, doesn’t it? She has always been insular, and pretty hostile to the idea of trying new things. I can hardly imagine her having to share her time and space with someone.
However, she does frequently whine about the inconvenience of being single, about how she’ll die alone, about how men don’t pay attention to her, about how she doesn’t have serious relationships, etc.
What I really think is that she’s a stubborn and un-confident person who doesn’t try because she’s already decided that she’ll fail. Having been in something sort of similar to that situation myself, however, I know that a person can slowly change and blossom, and that they’re happier for it.
Autolycus, thanks for coming to my defense. I think lissener is playing with the mods. As far as straight out telling her how she needs to change… sigh. I have found places to throw in the “try contacts” and “cut hair” advice, and she brushed it off. A couple days ago I tried to explain the milkshake-vs-husband situation to her, and she said, “I’ve never met a man who was more important than a milkshake”. She was visibly uncomfortable and trying to be funny while she said it.
I think the bit about not sleeping with married men is really good advice, but I think the rest of your post comes off a bit smug-married.
There’s something about marriage and kids that turns a goodly number of people super smugly*, I’ve found. Either they get obsessed with hanging out with other smug-marrieds and enjoying smug-married consumerism (picking out drapes and cribs) or they amuse themselves by issuing helpful advice to their single friends on how to achieve smug-marrydom.
Now as someone who enjoys singleton consumerism, I’m not going to bag on people for the whole obsessing over the home goods and baby gear, but I’d caution you against the second because I don’t think it does anything for a friendship.
“I am concerned that you’re going after unavailable men because of self-esteem issues” is one thing. “Maybe if you dressed like me you’d have a man,” is another.
*I’d like to state for the record that I have friends who are married that don’t fall into this category, some of them here on the Dope 
Bingo. It’s not like it’s not a valid thing to be concerned about, but you should probably try framing it differently.
In fact, I would just *ask *her why she does it. When I’m concerned about one of my friends, I find the best approach is to ask them why they think things are the way they are. That way when you start giving advice, a. they feel like you want to *help *them, and not *fix *them, and b. you at least know it’s somewhat relevant to where her head is at right now.
Granted, the hosts on What Not To Wear are paid to be funnily, bitchily abrasive; it may make you hate the show. But you know what? They’re usually right.
Time after time after time after time we’ll see women who fight tooth and nail against getting “gussied up”, citing just such reasons as we see upthread, and every single time they look 8,000% better after a cut and style, makeup and some good-looking clothes. As a result, they also positively glow with self-confidence. Yeh, it must sting to feel one has been a frump, but it sure as hell gets results.
Wish someone would give me $5,000 to blow on threads, though.
I definitely agree with this. Thank you for bringing it up.
There is nothing worse than sitting around being lectured on how to “achieve” something like marriage. It’s not at all like “give me advice on how to go to medical school.” I am happy for people when they find a partner. I am not particularly impressed by it the way I’m impressed when someone achieves something they’ve worked towards.
If you are concerned that she isn’t taking care of herself as a result of self-esteem issues, then discuss it in the context of “do you feel having a makeover or a change of style would make you happier or more confident?” I mean, why bring marriage/dating into it whatsoever? I find that to be very presumptuous. I also think it sets up a situation where if the person doesn’t achieve the promised result with X action, they tend to abandon it, even if they enjoyed it and could agree that it was good for them.
I don’t watch those shows, but does anyone go back in 5 years to see if that person is still following that advice/routine? I suspect they often aren’t.
Uniforms and costuming are important. It’s ok to adopt have artificial costuming for work, say, where you can sustain it for years. But I don’t think it’s a good idea to push yourself too far out of your sustainable comfort zone when you are looking for a permanent romantic attachment–eventually, something will have to give. This doesn’t mean self-adornment is pointless or stupid–far from it–but that you have to moderate whatever your changes are with what works for you and your personality, and that point may be different for different people. It doesn’t make it bad.
A woman who worked across the street from me was on What Not to Wear. She was back to her frumpy hippy dresses and ratty ponytails inside of three months.
That annoys me, not because I care what SHE looks like, but because like **teela brown **mentioned, I’d LOVE for someone to hand me $5000 to buy clothes. What a waste on someone who doesn’t care.
What about, “go shave that scruffy, scratchy mug! You’re a disgrace to your momma, and I ain’t kissing you till you do”?
Okay, not quite the same.
Let’s focus on the fact that my friend is upset about being lonely first, and I wish she’d try harder second. I am quite definitely not randomly deciding that she needs to get glam and then get a guy because I say so.
Really not. My boyfriend shaves in the morning and again before he sees me, not because I don’t like to look of him, but because having the lower half of my face abraded away every time we got together got tiresome. 
No kids here, but wow, you know, a good number of sdmb threads show me where I might be starting to mess up in my own life. Anu, I think I do what you are mentioning here to a single friend of mine.
She tends to be upset that she can’t meet a nice guy, but she’s been fixated on a guy who has displayed no romantic interest for years now.
And then I give her advice…again and again. I’m just going to shut up from now on, and thus potential smug will be beaten!
I wear contacts, and don’t use cotton balls for anything related to my wearing of contacts, nor do I even know what I might use them for. 
My advice to your friends, Sattua–
Get a trim. As long as her hair is she can probably safely cut off several inches. It’ll probably help make it easier to manage with the extra length gone, especially if she has split ends (which I suspect is the case).
Look at hair products. There’s some shampoos, conditioners and leave-in treatments that’ll help get rid of frizziness and prevent split ends, which will also make her hair more manageable on top of making it look better. Anything that can be added to a hair-washing routine is best, as it doesn’t complicate things too much.
Long hair can be a pain to take care of, but it doesn’t have to be complicated.