For one reason or another I’ve always been the person everybody comes to for advice. Friends, classmates, family, and people I barely know come up to me, tell me private often embarrassing stuff and don’t even think twice about it. They say I’m a good listener and after they’d unloaded their burdens on my hefty shoulders would comment that I should become a shrink.
Like for example this recently married woman came up to me in church. We knew each other from high school when I was senior and she a junior, we didn’t really hang out or get to know each other very well back then but we met again in church and, after a few minutes of catching up, she starts telling me about her troubles with her parents in law, the things about her own parents that annoy her and made her want to get married and away from them in the first place and about her sex life with the husband! Way too much information! And we’re in a church!
I mean, the parents thing I could handle, everyone has issues with their parents. The stories about her mother and father in law I thought was a little too much because they were deep family money issues that I had no business knowing. But the last thing? Come on! I really didn’t need to know how long it took before she could have sex with him, what his technique (or lack of it) in bed was, or how long the actual act lasts! Nooo! How am I supposed to look her husband in the eye from now on?
In high school I knew who’d lost their virginity, which girl had an eating disorder, who had a crush on who, etc, because they trusted I was not going to go out and spread their secrets. College was way worse, because most of my classmates were mature women, some with kids my age. Trust me when I say that age does not define maturity, the things these ladies told me were traumatic; those ladies were crazy!
Seriously, how in the world does a forty-year-old woman expect a seventeen-year-old to recommend a good gynecologist that will cure her vaginal dryness?!
So now that I’m a bit older, I think my opinions or advice might be better than before and I feel confident giving them away when asked … even if I’m still clueless about the drastic side effects of menopause.
But what do you do when the problem is major, as in life changing miserable-for-the-rest-of-my-life-if-you-don’t-help-me major? And what if the things that I think are the best to do are not necessarily what the person wants to hear? What do you do if you really care about this friend in need and yet you cant do much more than stand back and watch as it all goes down? Do I speak up what’s really on my mind and risk losing a friend? Or do I keep quiet or say what I think is most appropriate and then let it all play out? What are the limits of honesty in a friendship? How can I tell when to back off and when to push forward?
Confusing, right? We all know we are supposed to be there for our friends, in good and in the bad, but what does that really entail? Even with all the questions, I’ve come to the conclusion that all I can possibly do is be a good listener, offer some comfort in whatever form (food and alcohol work the best) and let my friend work through her issues however she sees fit, because at the end of the day she knows what is best for her. And hope that I’m doing the right thing.
But in the mean time I’ll try to keep being that person that puts other people at enough ease that they can tell me about their hemorrhoids, the drunken catfights over men, about that time they went number two in a public restroom and sent all the people running out of there with the stink, about sleeping with their best friend’s boyfriend and having to talk about what a coincidence it is all three of them have crabs, how they spit on their mother in laws lemonade and so on—at least in won’t be boring.
