My friend has left her husband for a man I detest. Should I tell her how I feel? | Leading questions
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Criticising a person’s partner is a pretty good way to strain a friendship, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. There’s no benefit in keeping the moral score. My friend of 30-plus years has thrown her husband out and started a new relationship with someone I detest. I feel torn between this sense that she’s behaved appallingly towards her husband and the tenure of our friendship. I want to be honest with her about my feelings but feel almost too angry to do it in a constructive way. What do you advise?.
Eleanor says: How much moral adjudication do we get to do of our friends? On the one hand you want to keep the bastards honest, and when you’re being a bastard, you want to be kept honest. On the other hand it does seem friendship involves keeping moral score of each other a little less than we ordinarily might.
I can see two scenarios here, and I’m not sure how much sharing your adjudications help in either. In the first scenario, things aren’t exactly as they seem. You say your friend has suddenly dropped a good person for a bad one and behaved appallingly in the process. Of course, sometimes marriages aren’t the way they look, and there’s always the chance this was more rational than it seems. Any chance the good man was in fact a bad one? Something happened that you don’t know about? The detestable replacement rubs you the wrong way but is in some way better to her than the husband? We necessarily know less about other people’s relationships than they do, and if this decision is after all more rational than it seems, you might do some damage by acting as though you see her breakup with greater clarity than she does.
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