The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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I (M27) have been giving one my friend from college (F27) dating advice via text for the past week. It's been frustrating on multiple levels. First, the situation. This girl is a grad student in ecology (American) at a university in Canada. She recently started hooking up with a French postdoc who is cheating on his long-term girlfriend with her. I don't see how this is going to end well. If this guy was going to leave his girlfriend (who he has been dating for a long time apparently) he would have done so already. Even if this somehow does happen, they're both academics not in their home countries, meaning a likelihood of ending up in the same place is very low. Finally, a relationship that begins with extended cheating is never going to end well because that reflects pretty badly on the impulse control of both parties. I told this girl this and that she needed to distance herself from this man, but she responded by saying that she "had to" pursue this relationship because she didn't know when she would "feel this way" again and that he was a "special guy". I'm frankly just baffled by this level of irrationality and naivety. Maybe from a 18-21 year-old women this would be understandable, but come on use your fucking brain. She is the sidehoe (at best) in this situation and the whole thing is causing such an unnecessarily large amount of stress while she's trying to finish her PhD that it doesn't take a genius to see that the juice isn't worth the squeeze in this situation. I'm continually surprised by the inability of smart people to make sensible and morally sound decisions when it comes to romance.
The second part of my frustration is more personal. I only have platonic feelings for this particular friend, but there have been many other examples with women in the past 5-10 years where my feelings have not been platonic and I have been asked to play the role of a gay best friend to give advice that will not be headed in an absolutely fucked romantic situation. This is almost entirely a me problem of setting boundaries. This most recent situation has made me realize that it's not good for me to be intimate friends with women who don't reciprocate my romantic interest, or with past girlfriends in general. The comparison game usually makes me feel really really bad about myself: why would women choose a shitty cheater over me? The solution is to not allow that comparison to be made by being more honest with those women about what my feelings are (I want a romantic partner, not another friend), and more honest with myself (it's not evil or mean to distance myself from a romantic situation that didn't work out).
The urge to suggest that this is solely a female type behavior is strong, but misguided. Probably this kind of swooning (over a caddish rake in this case) is more common in females but again I'm not even sure of that. Plenty of dudes leave committed wives after years because they met a hottie who pushes the right buttons. Trade the wife in for a younger model, as my wise aunt used to say. Women are perhaps pulled in the same foolish direction for different reasons--i.e. not mostly sexual. Women often have more lovey emotional reasons. This doesn't make it stupid. True, it's wrong and probably to some degree self-destructive. But I've seen a woman in a terrible bizarre relationship that at the time seemed so volatile that her life was arguably on the edge of ruin--only to, years later, now married to a different (stable) guy, state without irony that the bizarre relationship in question (now long over) was one of her fondest, most cherished memories of that particular time period. And yes this is a strikingly beautiful woman.
I personally think that the "gay best friend" role (as you put it) is an important role for every man to experience at least once, and it speaks well of you that any woman is willing to trust you with her inner emotional life. Although if you have designs on her yes, it will be a singularly awful experience for you. Once is probably quite enough though.
My view is that you should keep your eyes open, learn as much as possible about yourself and her during this period, and file the information away as one of life's oddities. Women and men can both turn emotionally on a dime, especially (though not only) when young. Not everyone, of course. Some of us are made of more solid stuff.
Luckily do not have designs on this particular woman, so in this case it is merely frustration that my friend is causing herself so much inner turmoil. Yet, as you state, she may not see it that way in a few years.
It has been an epiphany that I’ve played this role far too often in other relationships and in other contexts (not romantic).
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