Friend Wasting Her Life?

LegacyUser

I met this girl when we were in our mid-teens and we became good friends. We had a lot of shared interests and really clicked. But over the years I've grown up and she doesn't seem able to.

My last year at school was spent in a relationship, that ended in me being heartbroken. In college I was a typical student. I went out 5-6 nights a week, had a huge social group from college and my part-time job. Normal teen s**t. I know sometimes I was miserable but overall it was pretty great. Eventually I fell in love properly, moved to Dublin where he lived, got a rewarding job and a nice apartment. And things are great for me, although sometimes my job p****s me off, sometimes my boyfriend p****s me off, I hate paying rent and of course I miss having my own friends around me.

My friend on the other hand spent a lot of time studying, went to college where she was completely miserable. Took a long time to make friends and never seemed able to have fun. Nights out often ended with her in tears because she was lonely and miserable, and this made it harder for her to make friends because who wants to hang out with the friend of a friend who cries in the toilets all the time? She never really got the idea that dating could be fun - torturous, heart rending fun - but fun all the same. And so in the last 10 years she has had a few kisses and one relationship lasting 6 weeks. She left college and is in a career that doesn't interest her.

She moved to Dublin a year after I did but refuses to settle. She goes home about 45 weekends a year. She so rarely goes out even though she knows a lot of people here. Either she's too tired or she's broke. This despite the fact that she earns slightly more and pays slightly less rent than me and I have lots of money plus manage to save E50 a week. She constantly complains that she hasn't got a boyfriend but whenever guys ask her out she refuses. I sometimes tell her it doesn't matter if he hasn't a great career or she isn't crazy about him, she doesn't have to marry him ffs, she should just have some fun.

And she is getting so bitter. On a visit to my apartment she critisised everything from the oven timer to the house alarm. When I showed her any houses my boyfriend and I were looking at buying all she could say was we were crazy to think of paying for a house as they are too expensive. The small houses in D6 were stupid (agreed), just like the the bigger houses in D12 were stupid. If I have a problem or feel lonely I should stop complaining because I have a boyfriend so I don't know what lonely really is. If I try to offer her advice I don't understand anything cause I have a boyfriend.

The thing is, she is a very, nice sweet person. Who can still on occasion be great fun to be around. I want to help her, I think she is depressed and could benefit from counselling. I talked to her about it once but she started crying, said she knew she was depressed and she wanted to do something about it. I hated upsetting her so I said I wouldn't bring it up again for a while but she could talk to me if she wanted. It's been 18months and to be honest I think she is getting worse. And I'm moving abroad in a few months and I'm worried that things will get worse for her.

She seems to think her life is set this way. She thinks she will always hate Dublin but can't pursue her career at home so won't consider going back. She constantly wonders if it is fair to choose to have a child outside of a relationship as she thinks that is her only option. And she isn't even 30 yet. She mightn't have made the best of her life so far but it is by no means too late.

So, Thanks for reading my quite long post. And any suggestions as to what to do are appreciated.

ando

To me, It seems like your missing something about your friend. Why did all this happen in the first place, why did she not enjoy college and you did. What happened between school and going to college that made her so anti social and self destructive? I think that was the foundation for her current condition, its gradually grown and has left her in a depressive state, she maybe frightened or have a phobia of change or something like that. If she is depressive, you have to find out why she is like that, the real reason and try combat the reason. She says she's lonely and has no partner but yet she will not go out with anyone.... is she shy? does she have much experience in relationships? Maybe a kick in the butt would do her good cause it seems to me she's stuck in a rut and is desperately trying to find a way out.

Maybe she's just not happy in her job. That can be very depressing as many know, especially if she does not particularly know what to do about it. Some career councilor might come in handy, 'Q1ETC' give excellent advice. They were on the radio a while ago on the Pat Kenny show I think saying they turn people's lives around in the right direction. Something to look at

She goes home about 45 weekends a year. She so rarely goes out even though she knows a lot of people here. Either she's too tired or she's broke

She's hiding something there. Be a friend and talk to her, really talk to her and find out why she is going home 45weekends in the year, why is she avoiding going out.

WhiteWashMan

whyh dont you stop worrying about your friend, and start worrying about yourself for having such silly people as friends?

pickarooney

I might as well say it before someone else does - "she's a lesbian!"

the_syco

whattodo wrote:

She goes home about 45 weekends a year. She so rarely goes out even though she knows a lot of people here. Either she's too tired or she's broke.

Worked in Naas for 6 months. Stayed there for about 3 of the weekends, overall. Why? Cos all my mates were back home. Sure, I knew people there, but still, I knew my mates alot longer. I also seemed to be always broke, even though I got payed well (over 200 a week, after bills, rent, etc). Spent it mostly all on weekends back home.

Try to find out what she does @ the weekends, when she goes home.

I wouldn't know, since I never even got to base 1, but your friend sounds like she got bitten one, and is now twice shy. Have a girls night in, and try to find out if she had a relationship before/start of college that went badly.

LegacyUser

ando wrote:

What happened between school and going to college that made her so anti social and self destructive? I think that was the foundation for her current condition, its gradually grown and has left her in a depressive state, she maybe frightened or have a phobia of change or something like that. If she is depressive, you have to find out why she is like that, the real reason and try combat the reason.

She was fine when she started college, looking forward to starting, enjoyed rag week. But just started to founder after that. None of her friends were in the same college as her and she didn't really connect with anyone right away and it really threw her. She feels this huge pressure to succeed, because her sister is a total genius she thinks she needs to live up to that. It is something in her own head as her parents just want her to be happy and don't expect her to be her sister. Yet because of this her biggest concern was studying and doing well, it means she rarely went out, wouldn't take a part-time job so then even when she wanted to go out she could rarely afford it. When she eventually did make friends, good friends who she is still in contact with, her confidence was knocked so much she had herself mentally in a place that she couldn't really get out of.

ando wrote:

She says she's lonely and has no partner but yet she will not go out with anyone.... is she shy? does she have much experience in relationships?

the_syco wrote:

your friend sounds like she got bitten one, and is now twice shy. Have a girls night in, and try to find out if she had a relationship before/start of college that went badly.

The only relationship she had in the last decade lasted about 6 weeks. He's the only person she ever slept with, and the relationship didn't last long after that, (his choice not hers) so I'm sure it was another blow to her confidence. Before college she went out with a couple of guys, nothing serious, just dated for a few weeks and she never clicked with them so she ended it.

I'm pretty sure she isn't gay as when we were teenagers she had a number of different crushes on male tv and movie stars. We've also had the drunken, "do you think you could ever be with a woman" conversations (something I think most women talk about with each other) and she genuinely seems to have no interest.

the_syco wrote:

Worked in Naas for 6 months. Stayed there for about 3 of the weekends, overall. Why? Cos all my mates were back home. Sure, I knew people there, but still, I knew my mates alot longer. I also seemed to be always broke, even though I got payed well (over 200 a week, after bills, rent, etc). Spent it mostly all on weekends back home.

If her case was similar I would understand, but most of her friends live here or abroad. When she goes home weekends, she spends most of her time with her parents. She says she is more relaxed at home. Which I understand but travelling over 300 miles by train in the space of 48 hours is hardly relaxing.

Really I think she goes because she is worried her parents will be lost without her. I'm sure her parents miss her but I think it would be easier on them in the long run if she actually made a proper break. She can hardly spend the rest of their lives doing that journey every week. She has lived here for 2 years but can't make it feel like home because of this. And it makes it far more difficult to make friends or start a relationship if she goes home every weekend. I've suggested she should encourage her parents to come visit her more instead. They might enjoy the day out. But she is reluctant to change.

I think her guilt at leaving her parents alone could be her main problem. They have both been quite ill over the last few years but even they are now recovered and perfectly well she doesn't seem able to believe that they can live their own lives.

watsgone

I hate to state the obvious but it seems your friend just isn't happy in herself.
There can be many reasons for this, perhaps is isnt happy where her life is going or the job she does though she may be good even excellent at it, it might not be what she wanted to do.
She needs to do something she can call her own, something she wants, truelly wants.
Ask her to talk about it, ask her to be honest with you and herself.
Hope that helps.

WhiteWashMan

you seem to know a lot about what your friend is feeling.
surely if she has such a good friend as yourself, she cant be that badly off?

i think 'your friend' needs to start living her own life, and try not to live the life others want her to live...

CerebralCortex

Sounds like your friend is a victim of pop society culture and maybe the way she is, is because she can't handle the meaningless ratrace that is life.
Have you ever asked yourself why you do anything? When you get the answer apply the question why again to it and imho you will start to see how she feels.
Btw imho going out if you ever look at it without the beer gogles is extremely primative and degrading. :cool:

Dooid

I don't think you're going to find much help from the people in here. Sounds like you are a good friend so I think you'll have to do the fighting for her to begin with; what I mean by that is that if she is depressed and it sounds like she definitely is she'll fight you or anyone who tries to help. I'd recommend you get her to go to a GP and talk about medication, it sounds like it's impossible for her to make any decisions about anything at the moment, counselling could be counter-productive, medication should give her the resources, short term, to gain a bit of distance and make some life changing decisions. Like I said, I think you'll have a fight on your hands.

bombidol

talk to her, bring up everything. no holds barred. she will start whinging but that doesnt matter . let her cry her heart out and piss and moan. maybe a good night of truth will set her on the path to getting a life.

newestUser

Two things struck me when I read your post.

You're very critical of your friend ("She's wasting her life","I've grown up and she doesn't seem able to"). That's ok, you're entitled to your opinion. Do you use language like this when talking to her? Are you as critical of your friend to her face as you are in this post?

You also compare yourself to your friend. I found it strange that someone who was posting because she was worried about a friend went into so much detail about herself
(I got my heart broken in my final year in school, I went out loads in college, I have a rewarding career and nice apartment, I am madly in love with my boyfriend now).

Do you (explicitly or otherwise) criticise your friend for not being as successful as you in life/love/etc?

I'm dragging the thread a little off course I realise, but I'm just interested to hear your thoughts on this.

Zillah

Ooooh

[INSIGHT]

newestUser wrote:

Two things struck me when I read your post.

You're very critical of your friend ("She's wasting her life","I've grown up and she doesn't seem able to"). That's ok, you're entitled to your opinion. Do you use language like this when talking to her? Are you as critical of your friend to her face as you are in this post?

You also compare yourself to your friend. I found it strange that someone who was posting because she was worried about a friend went into so much detail about herself
(I got my heart broken in my final year in school, I went out loads in college, I have a rewarding career and nice apartment, I am madly in love with my boyfriend now).

Do you (explicitly or otherwise) criticise your friend for not being as successful as you in life/love/etc?

I'm dragging the thread a little off course I realise, but I'm just interested to hear your thoughts on this.

[/INSIGHT]

newestUser

After re-reading my post, and taking into account one or two of the earlier posts, I thought there might have been a chance that the original poster thought I was trying to set her up for a flaming. I didn't quite arrive at the point I was trying to make. It's possible the original poster won't reply to my post because she may think I'm just going to criticise her. For her benefit, here's what I was getting at.

It's sad that your friend hasn't made as much of her life as she could have. That's life though; it'd be nice to think that love/sex/career/friendship/etc arrive on schedule for everyone (with a little effort of course!), but for lots of people, they don't. Your friend is still young, and still has a lot of her life to live. There's plenty of time for her to turn things around.

You can't live your friends life for her. You have to recognise what you can do to help her, and what you can do nothing about. Your friend probably feels bad enough about her situation already. You may not think you criticise your friend, but from the tone of your post I think you probably do (though maybe you're not aware of it).

Criticising your friend for not having achieved what you have in life is unhelpful. Everybody's life follows a unique path, no two are quite the same. If you really want to help your friend, don't judge her, don't pity her, don't criticise her. Be sensitive to the fact that if she is unhappy in her career, she may not want to listen to you going on about
how wonderful yours is. Or if she has a non-existent love-life, she might not want to listen to you talking about how wonderful your boyfriend makes you feel. I'm not saying you can't talk about yourself, just bear in mind that your friend isn't doing as well as you are, and it's human nature to be bitter and envy others who are thriving when we feel like we're just treading water.

You can't do anything about your friends problems, only she can. Perhaps though with a bit of effort, you can make yourself a better friend in her eyes. I think that's worth something.

vorbis

in fairnest newestUser, what you're suggesting is leaving her in her rut. TTo be blunt, if she was going to drag hereself out of her situation by herself she'd have done so by now. In some sense, a bit of criticism could help. It will make her friend uncomfortable but it might make her want to engage more with life. Jealously can be a powerful motivator. Besides it seems that the OP and the girl are friends enough to be able to talk honestly between each other.

newestUser

I don't think that you can change someone. If the OP's friend is stuck in a rut, the desire to get out of that rut has to come from within herself. She may not be able to pull herself out of her rut. She possibly never will. And there's not much that the OP can do to directly influence that.

That's just my opinion on the matter anyway.

Sherifu

If she annoyed me that much id drop her as a friend.
But thats just me.

LegacyUser

Ok newestuser, I appreciate what you are saying. I thought a lot about posting about my own life but decided to. Partly because I wanted to paint an accurate picture of where we both were. There are a lot of people of different ages who post here and I think that problems have different significance at different life stages. If a 16 year old came on and said they were directionless and hadn’t any proper relationships I can guarantee at least 40% of the replies would tell them come back in 10-15 years.

Another reason is I wonder if maybe I am the best person to raise concerns to her as she may feel that I am criticising her for as you suggested, “not achieving what I have in life.” I couldn’t care less if she has a great career or relationship if she was happy. I have plenty of friends who are content to be single, unemployed (or perpetual students) and live in crap flats for the foreseeable future and I don’t judge them on that. I don’t expect all my friends to be the same as me. That would be bloody dull. But I would like them to be happy, she isn’t. She is miserable.

Also I never said I had a better career than her. I said mine was rewarding, I also pointed out that she has a better salary than mine. An awful lot of people would judge her job to be better than mine; I think more people would choose hers over mine. I don’t think she would ever want to do my job. But the difference is mine makes me happy and hers doesn’t. She doesn’t hate it or anything, but it doesn’t fulfil her. Most peoples don’t, but she doesn’t have much else. It keeps her from her family and she says the stress from wanting to get ahead is what stops her from going out.

My job involves working with the elderly, and I meet all sorts. Many who make me worry about my friend as I can see a similar attitude that has led to them leading unhappy lives. This morning I spent time with this woman who let a minor disability have a completely detrimental effect on her life. She braves through it, but it shattered her confidence. It convinced her that she would never marry, and so she didn’t. Not because of the problem she was born with but as a kind of self-fulfilling prophesy. And my friend is like this. She’s not yet 30 but has convinced herself she won’t find someone so she won’t look. She has convinced herself she has only one career option so won’t consider anything else even though she doesn’t like what she is doing. She has decided she doesn’t like Dublin so she won’t go out. And while she is young now, if she doesn’t manage to change her outlook it is unlikely anything will change for her.

She has asked for my help. She asked me to introduce her to other people so I did. And they all really liked her. One girl she got on great with often tries to include her in plans but she never comes out. She led on a number of my male friends before dropping them in a really childish way. Not out of meaness, but I don’t think it was fair to dump a guy by never returning his calls and asking me to tell him she didn’t like him. I am often tempted to do as you suggest and just let her off. I never feel comfortable talking about my life in front of her. As if I have a problem I am told I don’t know how lucky I am or it’s my fault and if things are going well it is implied that I don’t deserve it or am being naïve. I don’t think she means to come across this way, if she did I doubt we’d still be friends.

But you know what, you are right. How my life is shouldn’t have any impact on whether I decide to talk frankly with her or not. I’m still not sure if that is the best thing to do, though. I’m not sure if I don’t want to do it because I’m afraid it would make things worse if I did it wrong or if it’s just that I don’t want to come off like a bad guy. Hell, if just asking for advice can make me come across that way how much could I screw it up by actually trying to make her confront how unhappy she is.

newestUser

Ok, point taken that you just want your friend to be happy, not that she have X Y and Z in her life.

True, you didn't say that you thought you had a better career than your friend. But you did say that you were happy in your job and your friend wasn't. That's not inconsistent with what I said in my previous posts.

It's very hard to offer someone advice which they badly need to hear when they are either unwilling or unable to listen to it. From the tone of your posts, I thought you were very critical of your friend and pitied her, and maybe when you tried to speak to her, these attitudes came across to her. I don't think that's helpful.

I think though that ultimately we're all responsible for own happiness and well-being. No-one can handle that responsibility for us. If your friend's not willing to take the necessary steps towards fulfilment and happiness, it doesn't matter what advice you give her, or what you try to do for her. Same for the woman you met in work with the disability. You could surround her with any number of people telling her how attractive she was, what wonderful company she was and how she was going to make some man very happy, but if in her own head she didn't believe it, it wouldn't matter how much encouragement you gave her. Ditto your friend.

You can bring a horse to water, but you can't make him drink? Something like that may be relevant here!

Oryx

She has a good friend in you for sure. Maybe having people in her life who are successful and happy is actually making her analyse her own life, and be dissapointed more. She seems to feel like the lowest rung in her peer group success ladder, and her confidence is wrecked. I dont know how you fix that, some people never do, others need a huge shock to create change for them. But you are not her counsellor, and allowing her to lean on you too much wont help her. All you can do is encourage and support, dont take on any guilt for how her life is.

shoegirl

pickarooney wrote:

I might as well say it before someone else does - "she's a lesbian!"

Really? There doesn't seem to be an iota of evidence to suggest this.

Some people who are not from Dublin find it difficult to settle. In fact many people from Dublin find the city and county stressful and exhausting. I know many friends who go home every weekend they can and with petrol/train prices as they are, this is extremely expensive. No wonder she is broke.

I'd suggest breaking the ice a little and asking her if things are ok and if you can do anything to help. There's nothing wrong with her if she's not happy in her job or in Dublin. Remember not to judge.