Longtime friend making questionable life choices

[Cadence44]

Hello friends. I haven’t been on this site in some time, but I find myself in need of some advice and I’d appreciate your valuable insight. This is going to be lengthy, so I thank you in advance for reading.

 

I have a female friend (we’ll call her Jane) that I have known for close to 15 years. We are both in our 30s. I love Jane. She is warm, funny and treats people well. We currently live hours away from one another, though we talk about once a month and visit one another every so often.

 

Recently, Jane and I were planning a trip for my birthday to a city I’m considering moving to. She was also considering moving there. We were at the point of buying airline tickets when she asked if we could wait until her next paycheck. That was fine with me. On her payday, I texted and asked when she’d have internet access so we could finalize dates and book tickets. She said she’d call me a few days later. I asked why, since I’d thought we just needed to wait until her payday and because I was concerned that the ticket prices were continuing to rise. She replied the next day telling me that she was out of town without internet access. (Oh. That would have been helpful to tell me.) Basically from there it devolved into about of week and a half of confusing intermittent texting back and forth with no success of her ever being in front of a computer and able to book tickets.

 

Finally, I got frustrated and stopped reaching out, and she stopped contacting me. I knew what the flakiness and lack of details meant – she no longer wanted to go but wasn’t going to be forthcoming with me. I’ll get back to “the birthday trip that wasn’t”, but first let me talk about Jane.

 

Jane is a kind and lovely person. But she’s made a lifetime of bouncing from relationship to relationship, seemingly waiting for a guy to save her from her life. She talks a big game about feminism and independence, but her relationship choices told another story. In the past, I've encouraged her to spend some time on her own to get to know who she is outside of a relationship. She actually did that for about 6 months, but has since returned to her old ways. She moved back to her hometown, which she hates. For the past 4 or 5 years, she's been at the same job bouncing from guy to guy, with an average of 2 weeks before she meets someone new. She's dated addicts and those relationships have ended when they've both blown up on one another. She's dated stable guys who tended to lose interest because I think she was on a fast-forward timeline and it scared them off. I also don't think it helped that she always slept with guys very early on. I tried to tell her to give it some more time to make sure she wasn't attaching herself to these guys before she knew who they were. That fell on deaf ears with talk of being a sexually positive woman and how she doesn't want to be part of archaic relationship rules and wanted to do what she felt like doing.

 

Recently, after a few weeks of ending a relationship with an addict, she reconnected on Facebook with a guy she’d dated for a week in middle school. We’ll call him Bob. Bob pursued Jane. In my years of friendship with Jane, I can tell when she really likes a guy by the way she talks about him. She did not talk about Bob in an excited way, so I started to suspect that she was talking herself into liking him but I didn't mention my suspicion to her.

 

I was happy for her until she called me about a month after her first date with Bob crying because he had been mean to her. He’d been spending weekend nights at her apartment, and two nights prior to her calling me, his car had been stolen outside her building. Now, I understand that might be stressful for someone, but Bob spent the next 48 hours blaming Jane for his car getting stolen because she’d suggested the space where he’d parked his car. She told me that she stood up for herself and told him that it wasn’t her fault, but he carried on until Bob decided to tell "his side" to Jane’s roommate about what had happened and the roommate told Bob that he was being an a** and to stop blaming Jane.

 

This had, understandably, really shaken Jane up. While talking to her about it, I told her that I’d understand an hour of frustration, but his blaming her for so long for something that was clearly out of her control was a serious red flag that this guy wasn’t quite right and she needed to back away from the relationship. This is when she told me that this guy is a military veteran, but was discharged because he is psychologically impaired. I asked her if he had PTSD from serving overseas, and she said he’d never been overseas, so I'm not clear on the details. She also said that she had met his parents and his father had anger issues and his mother seemed very cold.

 

After being supportive of Jane and cautioning her about a relationship with this man, she started making excuses for him. She said something along the lines of “Well, men are childish, and you have to put up with some things if you want to have a relationship”. I was flabbergasted. This is a woman who is a feminist, who works at a crunchy health food store and who is frequently out protesting what she sees as injustices in the world, but she thinks that she has to make excuses for a man and put up with his emotional abuse?

 

It gets worse. She told me that she would feel like it would be a loss if she never had a child, so she and Bob were already having sex without any protection because they both wanted to have a baby.

 

I took a moment to compose myself about what felt like the description of an impending train wreck. I told her that I had to be honest with her that having a baby with a man she’d been with for two months and who was showing evidence of anger issues wasn’t a good idea. His psychological problems could have a genetic component given that she'd said that his parents were unpleasant and angry people, and a child may inherit those genes. Not to mention that if he was already emotionally abusive to her when he was stressed out about something, he would do the same thing to a child.

 

I asked her why she would be willing to bring a child into that environment knowing that it wasn’t going to be a good one, and she said that I didn’t know that it would be bad. Besides, she said, she could always be a single mom! I reminded her that by choosing to have a child with this man, it wouldn’t necessarily be so easy. He could want custody. He could want to keep her from moving away with his child, and he might legally make that happen. She’d be tied to him for the next 19 years and their child would be tied to him and his dysfunction for life. I reminded her that babies are stressful, and that this life she was choosing was not going to be a fairy tale since Bob's already shown alarming reactions to stress.

 

I grew up with an alcoholic father who was prone to fits of rage, which Jane knows about. She knows about my struggles. She knows I struggled with self-confidence for many years, that when I wasn't dating jerks that I have had lifelong problems with letting myself get close to good men and committing to them, even though it's something that I really want. I reminded her that in my experience it seems better to grow up with an absent parent than to grow up with one that is present but who hurts you emotionally at critical developmental ages (of course I don't know that and I recognize that it's not an easy road for kids with absent parents, either. I just think if you have a choice absence is better than a source of active damage). I told her that choosing Bob as a father was not going to be fair to any baby that she would bring into the world.

 

Overall, I was gentle about expressing my opinion. I have learned that objecting to a friend’s romantic partner is something that can end friendships unless you are careful. So I gently told her my opinion and then I dropped it. She listened to what I said, and thanked me for listening to her. And all was fine until the trip planning. Somewhere along the line, instead of making plans with me, she texted to tell me that she and Bob were “Facebook official!” I didn’t reply. Jane is in her 30s, had been trying to have a baby with Bob, yet later becoming Facebook official was a milestone to be celebrated? Ugh.

 

Yesterday, after not hearing from her in about a week and a half about booking tickets, I decided to contact her. I resisted the urge to write a passive-aggressive message, even though I was upset with her. I really dislike it when friends abandon friends because they are in a new relationship. She knows that, and I felt like that was what she was doing. A vacation with me was no longer a priority, even though she had been excited about it and it was a trip to celebrate my birthday. Her relationship with Bob was now her life and a friend of 15 years becomes nothing more than a footnote.

 

Yesterday afternoon I texted her a neutral message, saying I was checking in and was wondering if she was still interested in the trip for my birthday. She replied at midnight, saying “I don’t think I can afford it. And I might be pregnant! I’m 6 days late! I haven’t told Bob yet since I haven’t taken a test.”

 

Friends, I have no clue what to say to her. I feel that texting her a congratulations would be disingenuous given what I see are her selfish and reckless decisions that will impact her life, Bob’s life and her future baby’s life. I don’t think that she loves Bob, and even though I don’t like him nor trust him, I think he thinks that Jane loves him. To me, it is clear that she’s got her head in the clouds and the most important thing to her was a selfish decision to make a child, no matter what environment she’d be bringing it into.

 

I think Jane will be a good mother and I understand that the child might be resilient and emotionally healthy even with Bob as a father. I just wish she’d chosen a better father for her baby or even "accidentally" had a baby as a result of a one-night stand (even though that wouldn't be fair to the guy). Honestly, I feel like she's condemning this baby to a life of serious issues as a direct result of her poor decision making.

 

I’ve lost quite a bit of respect for her and I think I will have to come to terms with the fact that this is probably the point where our friendship will end. It’s been 15 years, but she’s perfectly content to blow off plans for my birthday, which means she’s not being a good friend to me. She didn’t even apologize and my feelings are hurt, but it's not the main reason I think it's time for the friendship to end.

 

I'm upset to have to lose a good friend. Honestly, I could stick around but I don't feel compelled to stick around and be supportive of her when her fairy tale blows up in her face, which I feel is only a matter of time.

 

And part of me feels like I’m being set up with the text she’s sent to me, when she already knows how I feel about her trying to have a baby with Bob. If I don’t respond with joy, she can then tell herself excuses like that I’m clearly just jealous of her happiness and therefore she can disregard anything I’ve ever said about her choices.

 

I'm honestly at a loss with what I should do and I feel I have a time limit to decide. Should I reply to her text? If I do, what should I say? Part of me wants to be blunt and honest, part of me wants to text a disingenuous “congratulations” and then drop off the face of the earth and part of me doesn’t want to reply at all. I want to be clear that it is not my intention to be cruel to her or to hurt her feelings, but I really can't say that I'm happy for her and for the baby she is probably bringing into the world, because that would be a lie.

[Pinnacle]

No amount of logic will persuade her to change her behavior. Really, if she's pregnant then mission accomplished. A break up or divorce will probably occur a few years down the line and there will be one more single mother out there and another father who will probably have minimal contact with his child. Wonderful!!! /sarcasm

 

Be mean. Hurt her feelings. She is making a selfish, emotional decision on what she FEELS is right for her, but in all reality it will turn her life upside down. I'm sad that this kind of scenario really can be considered "normal" nowadays.

 

You tried to help her, says she is thankful, and doesn't do anything with it. If you want to drop off the face of the Earth, it probably won't affect her life one bit to be quite honest. She hasn't listened to you yet.

[Fudgie]

I wouldn't tell her "congrats". Falling pregnant is not always a good thing or even anything to be happy about in some situations, like this one.

 

Don't tell her congrats or in any way imply that you are happy on behalf of her and this poor child (who will no doubt have a miserable life). Just give her unbiased, sound, logical advice. If she doesn't like it, she can leave and go find a group of single mums to cry to.