Slate has a advice column which I occasionally glance at.
This time the writer has a friend who is engaged to marry a guy with a bad reputation of going out with coworkers and them dumping them badly. Prudence’s response
Which is pretty much what everyone says. You can tell someone the are making a mistake, but they have to take responsibility as some point.
So what kind of mistakes have you “let” your friends make?
I’ve got a song writer / musician friend who does OK with a particular style of music. A year ago, he decided that he was going to be a pop star, made a band, wrote a bunch of songs (which were actually pretty decent) and gave it a shot. Unfortunately, it caused a lot of problems in his normal music gig.
The problem was that his band sucked. The original music was alright, but the lead singer was an amateur who clearly lacked voice training. My friend sounded like he was just pushing it on the bass and his singing wasn’t inspired on anything but one track about betrayal.
At the time, another singer friend and I were discussing it. We were shaking our heads but couldn’t figure a way to show him objectively how bad it was. Eventually, the project came apart. He was extremely fortunate to salvage his career, but he almost lost it all.
Of course, I’ve made a ton of bad choices myself and while people have hinted that it wasn’t the best, no one was particularly blunt about it.
And uncharacteristically, I have managed to keep my trap shut about knowing that he was headed for disaster.
I have a close friend same as I 68 yrs old. He recently inherited $450,000. He has been living with his mother until she passed for the past 28 years and has not had any real gainful employment in that time. He makes $600.00 per month SSI and that’s it.
I advised him to get a bachelor apt. and maybe start drawing about $25,000 a year out to live on. Well, he rents a $5,000 per month house buys an $80,000 car, takes up playing cards on a daily basis, spends about $500.00 per month on pot, and eats out in nice restaurants at least 2 meals a day, about 3,000 per month on food.
Less than 2 years into his inheritance he is very close to flat broke and is making no changes claiming he is going to gear his real estate business back up very soon.
I feel like I should have gotten him down and beat his brains in but there really is nothing you can do.
Ha! I like to read Dear Prudence too! I question the advice of the new one a lot more than I did with the old one. New one also seems to believe that therapy is the answer for everything.
ANYWAY, this thread just sent me to flashback city with my ex-wife. It was agonizing, trying to reconcile I-love-you-and-want-to-support-you with you-are-making-an-awful-decision. Over and over and over. Then she’d get mad at me when things panned out exactly like I suggested they would.
My best friend from high school (drummer) and his older brother (guitarist) have been musicians since childhood. They have been in numerous bands, both together and solo. Recently they started a project together and decided they were both going to sing. My friend played me some of the songs and they are absolutely terrible singers. I’m talking first-week American Idol bad. They, however, think they are really good. How can you be a musician for 30+ years and be so oblivious to how awful you sound?
Let them? How can I stop them. At least I’m the one telling them they’re making a mistake marrying that bum and/or gold digger while everyone else is congratulating them. Usually they thank me for being honest after they wave goodbye to their money and homes. A friend gives an honest opinion, and then stands aside.
One friend (who I’ve mentioned repeatedly in the Pit) makes bad decisions on a regular basis.
When we lived together, friends and I had numerous “pseudo-interventions” on his alcoholism. He would then break down crying and say he was going to get sober. Usually lasted a few days. Even after he was hospitalized and told that if he continued drinking, he’d die in the very near future. He actually went clean for about 2 weeks after that, but then told all of us that his doctor said that he could drink moderately. Well, even if we believed him, he went back to his binge-drinking ways.
He also quit one job to work for a nonprofit, testing the homeless and people near the bar areas of town for STDs. Granted, it was a shady operation - poorly run from top to bottom - but he routinely showed up late to work, would ask friends to falsify tests (just to make pseudonyms to hit quotas), etc. He ended up quitting because he found an amazing new opportunity in “sales,” where after the first year, he claimed that he was told he’d be making more money than me, with my post-graduate degree. I researched the company and read employee testimonials, and saw that it was a MLM, consisting mainly of cold calls and going door to door to companies and individuals. I warned him about it, but he dismissed my protests. Ended up quitting the second day. Well, he didn’t even go back on his second day. He also skipped several interviews that friends had set up for him, choosing to go drink at a bar that was open before 9 am.
Finally, he’s very dependent, to the point he would enter into unhealthy relationships at the speed of light. After two days together, he’d claim that nobody could experience a love as strong as the one between him and his flavor-of-the-month. Was in an abusive relationship for a few years, and the (in)significant other practically lived at our apartment. Rumor has it that he was living out of his car beforehand, and that was part of the reason they were together. Physical and emotional abuse, and the guy ended up chasing all of my friend’s friends away because nobody could stand him. Numerous heart-to-hearts about how the boyfriend was isolating my friend went unheard, and eventually they moved in together, and I found my own place. (I was really only living with him because he couldn’t afford a place on his own, and I liked having another person around.) A handful of separations and reconciliations later, and they finally broke up, and now the friend is living at his mom’s place because he has nowhere else to go.
Love the guy like a brother, but he’s pretty helpless.