Should I be blunt but honest if the occasion arises?

[asrl78]

A bit of background:

I met a very nice lady when volunteering and we quickly became close friends, she is very tactile and found out I enjoy hugging women and that was how the ice broke between us. After a certain time she moved to another shop to volunteer and she invited me into her canasta group who play at someones house on Sunday evenings. There are six of us, three men and three women, all of them I get on with; however, there is one woman who is the textbook definition of a dolly downer. She has had and continues to have family, financial and health issues* (some I have been told are self inflicted) and is always dwelling on them and complaining/sighing every Sunday evening. I can tolerate this as the canasta group is the only regular F2F contact I have with my friend, but I find her attitude draining, it is a mood killer at times.

I would love to be able to help her but I know there is nothing I can do. My question is, would it be unreasonable if, when a suitable occasion occurred (e.g. she said something where the response could follow naturally), I was direct and told her straight that at least part of the problem is her negative attitude and this pushes people away. Part of me feels she needs to be told some hard truths but part of me doesn't want to risk pushing her into a state of depression.

I am a little pulled in two directions. In normal circumstances she is not a person I would choose to associate myself with (for other reasons that what I have put here), but I can't help but feel compassion.

*Examples:

She has little disposable income but keeps giving money to her 40-something year old son who lives on a rented boat somewhere in London which is in poor condition. Her son prefers to live like that rather than move in with her, and she wouldn't want him living with her anyway although she claims to love him. She closely follows christianity and believes her son is demonised because he is into new age stuff (whatever that means).

She has problems with her feet and back but won't see someone because of the state of her finances.

She has a car in poor condition which she doesn't get regularly serviced to save money, instead gets things fixed when necessary (which is more expensive in the long term).

She lives alone in a sizable house in which I think she struggles with maintenance costs when they arise. Others in the group have suggested downsizing or releasing equity.

That’s the nature of social and hobby groups: there will be people there who you don’t get gel with or who you find a bit irritating, but you just let them have their conversations with the people who are happy to listen and make your own conversations with others. She isn’t your friend, she’s not going to take a near-stranger’s “home truths” on board, and you’re just going to come across as the newbie who joined the pre-existing group and now wants to drive away others. Like most people with problems in their lives, in all reality she knows exactly what she needs to do about them - but change is hard, and scary, and she’s not ready to make it yet.

If all the other group members seem happy to allow her to talk, or actively want to make suggestions and give advice then perhaps you either need to a) reflect that they don’t find her as irksome as you or b) try and divert the conversation to other topics.

Just don't be a dick. If she was able to make the changes, she would have done by now, so don't give her more to be unhappy about.

So you basically want to tell her off for being poor when you fully acknowledge she can't afford to fix these things?

If you're brutally honest, you're gonna hurt people, because we make mistakes and owning up or saying the truth hurts people, I know a couple blunt but honest people. Is the bluntness coming from a place of love? I hate when ppl beat around the bush. Im blunt, it's progress not perfection .

Learn to be comfortable around negative people without trying to change them. It’s a difficult skill if you grew up in a household where you were expected to fix things

This! Every one of the examples the solution was money - which she doesn’t have! She may not be able to release equity in her home for any number of reasons. By the time she’s paid all of the associated costs to downsize, who knows how much she would have left. If the house needs a lot of repairs or sprucing up, maybe she’d struggle to sell it.

as for the car comments… we have had our older car (2009) serviced every year. We do less than 5k miles a year in it these days. We have had thousands of pounds worth of work done on it over the last couple of years despite the services - there’s an awful lot of things that can go wrong on a car that isn’t looked at as part of the service you know….

I’m also here to try to find out about the random “I like to hug women” comment!

What a peculiar post 🤣 Just leave her be- it’s pointless and you risk making the group dynamic awkward. You like hugging women? 🤔