Would you say anything if you feel a friend's relationship is somehow making them unhappy?

[DiegaMartinez]

Sorry this will be vague but this isn't my information to give away.

I have a very, very old friend who has been married for over 5 years now. Her DH is a nice guy, I like him - this isn't personal.

However there is an aspect of their relationship which is missing. It was mostly missing when they decided to get married, and it has pretty much disappeared entirely since then.

If my friend was happy with this I wouldn't even think about it. But for a long time she would complain about it to me (you know, few glasses of wine into an evening), and she was finding it a problem. She said she had spoken to her DH about it and he agreed they would try and change things, but nothing really changed.

Over the past year or so her entire opinion/attitude to this missing part of her relationship has changed. She now doesn't want it. She now has opinions disliking that thing as a whole. It's sort of changed an aspect of her personality, if that makes any sense.

I'm worried, as her oldest and closest friend, that while she might have convinced herself at the moment that it isn't something she needs in a relationship, it is something that will come back in years to come and be a problem, maybe just for her, maybe for her entire relationship.

I don't entirely feel it is my place to say anything. If she's not asking for help, I know I shouldn't interfere. I'm not talking about any form of abuse, belitting, anything like that.

But I do worry about her, because she's my friend.

Would you say anything?

What are you talking about?

Lack of sex?

You can't lecture your friend on the importance of sex, really you can't. Maybe she's genuinely perfectly happy being celibate?

Apologies, have nc for this so I suspect my posts won't come up in a different colour.

If I felt she was genuinely perfectly happy then I definitely wouldn't lecture her. I know that every relationship is different and what suits one couple won't suit another couple.

It's more than she saw it as a problem, a big problem, and then it didn't get fixed and the years have passed and now she might suddenly, a few drinks into an evening together, launch into an unprompted speech about how it's not that important in a relationship. Which when she last did that suddenly rang alarm bells with me in that sort of 'protesting too much' way.

If I felt she was happy with the situation I wouldn't even think twice about it. But I'm suddenly worried that she isn't. And I see threads on here where posters say that they have hit breaking point and they can't go on like that anymore. And I can also see that it has affected her self-esteem and the way she views herself as a person - the way she talks about how she looks, a focus on wanting to lose weight for example, as if she is unconsciously concerned that that is what the problem is.

I suspect the answer is just be there for her, which I always would be. It just worries me, as someone who loves her, that she is accepting the situation now because there are other things going on in their life, but it might become an issue in the future. That and how it has affected her self-esteem.

I would never bring it up out of the blue, but was just wondering really if she started to touch on it, how to react.

No. I have rarely seen a relationship that from the outside looks anything other than horrible to me. I've also got a 100% wrong rate in predicting which of my friends would split up with their partners (this isn't a hobby of mine - just that the friends whose houses I stumble away from thinking 'how are they surviving' are still together 15 years later, whereas the couples I thought were living the dream split like cheap wood.

I suspect the common factor is that I must be quite a tense person to be around and a lot of the people I know behave out of character in front of me, or perhaps in front of me and their partners together?

I would agree with you that it sounds to me as if it is an enduring fault line in her marriage - she keeps coming back to the topic. All you can do is be honest - if it's important to you in a relationship, do say so. I wouldn't comment on the changes in her - people do change, all the time.

meandjulio I'm sure it's not you at all. I've started to realise that, beyond the obviously abusive, it's quite hard to know who will split up and it may just be that some people keep going and some don't! It certainly isn't always obvious from how people appear to get on in front of others.

As for this dilemma, my rule of thumb if I'm a bit worried about something for a friend is just to reflect back what they said- so I might say 'you say that now, but before you were a bit worried, are you really ok?' but if they then said 'yes' then I would take that at face value. People and things do change between early days of a marriage and further in, often people do just resign themselves to certain things or just not want to split up so accept a compromise and rationalise it to themselves.

I wouldn't speak to her more than that, it's up to her what mind tricks she plays to keep her marriage together, or perhaps she really does care less over time, for example, if it were sex and she'd had a baby, she may genuinely care less about it as some (not all) people do.

You can't live an adult's life for them.