Couldn’t Be Me: How to tell a friend what they don’t want to hear

Welcome to Couldn’t Be Me, a weekly advice column where I solicit your personal dilemmas and help out as best as I can. Have something I can help you with? Find me @_Zeets.

This week is about the frustration of boundaries. Often in life, we want so much better for people in our lives than their present conditions. We know they’re not only capable of better, but that they’re being unjust to their happiness by accepting less than they should.

Yet, despite that knowledge, trying to make another person accept our vision for their life can also be an injustice to them. Respecting other people also means respecting their right to choose, even if they’re making choices contrary to what we think they should.

This week, we talk through this frustration, and how to come to peace with it while still looking out for the people we care about.

Tyler:

Hey Zito, I have a problem of finding a purpose in our doomed world (seems to be a common one nowadays). I got a technical degree from a good school, but when it came time to look for a job I couldn’t bring myself to stick myself in an office. I got a digital lit and a creative writing minor and find myself wanting to write fiction.

I got a job for one year teaching English as a foreign language, and was mostly drawn to it due to the temporary single year nature of it, but after it’s over I have no idea what to do. Office jobs don’t feel like they have a point if the Earth and or economy will collapse before I’m 50. I liked teaching but the burnout is incredible (especially at a majority Palestinian Arab school in a poor town in Israel). I’m not loving teaching enough to continue. I only took this because it was the first temporary job outside the US I was offered.

I’m not unhappy here, but looking forward, it’ll be time for a change but I have no idea what. Part of me says ‘buckle down’ but the other parts of me hates that thought.

CBM:

The blessing of the writing life is you can do it while doing other things. Many of the greatest writers had a steady income while pursuing their literary dreams — though there’s a chance you end up like Franz Kafka, who worked for an insurance company. But the point stands that you can satisfy your desire to write while doing other things for survival.

At least in your case, your teaching — the situation of it, and your interaction with children in that world — could help your writing tremendously. The burnout that is particular to a Palestinian Arab school in a poor town in Israel is an experience worth writing about.

The curse of writing is it’s incredibly difficult to make it your sole vocation. So much depends on structures beyond the individual than on their talent. Often you have to know the right people, attend the right events, have certain credentials, and receive enough financial support from friends and institutions to no longer have to worry about doing anything else to live. Writing is democratic by nature, but succeeding in it is anything but. If you want to write, you need to come to terms with the potential of suffering for it.

The choice is there. You can write while working jobs that keep you in a stable financial position, or you can jump all in with writing, knowing its precarity. Or you can find some rich, older woman to sponsor you, which I, and Rilke, highly recommend.

Ralph:

I coach the B team of a college club sport (ultimate frisbee). The A team is on the verge of being nationally competitive. The B team is trending up and has the potential to be the best in the region. However, I can’t seem to get the kids to put in the work to reach that potential. I tell them time and again that they need to be working daily to reach the goals we’ve set as a team, but still the majority of them don’t. I’m not sure how I can motivate them to push themselves. Any advice?

CBM:

The problem with motivation is you can only push people as much as they want to be pushed. You can’t convince someone to fight for something they don’t consider as important as you do. I’ve coached youth soccer a few times and it is frustrating to try to show your players the vision and possibility of the team when all they want to do is run around without focus.

You’re in a predicament. If you push your players too hard and try to impose your vision, they will almost certainly begin to resent you. But you also can’t help the frustration of seeing them do less than what they’re capable of. (My high school teachers are shaking their heads.)

The most you can do here is have a clear conversation with the players and explain the possibilities and rewards of success, what you want from, and how you can help them if they’re willing to work.

And then you need to listen to what they want. If they’re on board, then you can push them harder, even if they resist somewhat. People will naturally push back when they leave their comfort zones.

But if they state that they don’t want the same things that you do, then you have to respect that. There is no point in trying to force someone to be great at something that they don’t value.

Margot:

My friend is dating someone who refuses to call her his girlfriend. He’s hesitant, he says, because he’s a divorcee. (He and his ex-wife split 2.5 years ago.) But he and my friend have been together for 11 months. The divorcee thing is understandable, but there are many red flags: She bends around his schedule, she hasn’t met his friends, he rarely texts back but is upset when she doesn’t respond promptly. Despite choosing to create this distance, he also insists on exclusivity. He fucking sucks. She asks me for advice all the time, but when I’m honest, she gets defensive for him. How do I tell my friend that the person she’s dating doesn’t seem good for her without alienating her?

CBM:

I love the name Margot so much.

Anyway, one of the most frustrating things in life is watching your friends suffer and being unable to save them. You can’t force them to see how the predicament is beneath them.

Your friend’s case seems like another situation of “people will treat you the way you allow them.” From what you’re saying, that relationship is all on the guy’s terms. He gets her to be “exclusive” but can still leave the relationship open by not committing to calling her his girlfriend. While there’s nothing wrong with a relationship outside the boundaries of boyfriend and girlfriend, both individuals need to agree to those terms. It seems your friend wants commitment and true exclusivity and the guy doesn’t, but she doesn’t want to lose him by pushing too hard. So she’s stuck with being unhappy, but being more comfortable in that unhappiness than the potential of being alone, even if leaving that relationship might be the best thing for her in the long run.

There’s not much you can do beyond showing her how unfair the situation is. I lost a close friend once because I crossed the line in a situation like that, even though my former friend is much happier now because of it. He was being strung along by a woman who was seeing other people while telling him words of love and adoration. He couldn’t convince himself that she was with other people.

So I showed him exactly what was going on, calling her and having both of us confront her about what she was doing. She admitted to it and blocked both of us. Hilariously, she’s now married to someone else who I know, one of the guys who she was with at the time.

Anyway, my friend was so devastated that our relationship ended. We hung out for a while after, and he found someone else, but eventually my violation of his choice wore our friendship down within a year. And I did cross the line. Even though I couldn’t stand seeing someone so wonderful being mistreated, I should not have taken the choice out of his hands. I was willing to be the bad guy in order to show him how unjust she was.

I don’t think that’s the best path to go down, especially if you want to preserve your friendship. No matter how right you are, there’s the potential that your friend will resent you for centering yourself and taking power away from them. It’s still their life, and they should get to choose what they subscribe to, no matter how bad it is for them.

All you can truly do is continue to show them the truths of the relationship. And continue to do that even if your friend tries to reinforce the borders of the delusion that keeps her from leaving. Bear in mind that her actions are understandable. Love is so wonderful and rare that we often unwisely grasp at whatever looks closest to it.

But she has to make the decisions for herself. The fact she’s asking you for advice means she knows something is wrong with that relationship, and it may be only a matter of time until it becomes untenable.