Picture this.
You’re meeting up with one of your closest friends for a lunch date. You go to meet up with her and her eyes sweep over you. She takes in every detail, your hairstyle, your clothes, your makeup or lack thereof. Before even saying hello to you or greeting you with a hug, she says, “You look terrible. You couldn’t have found a better outfit or done a better job with your hair?”
She takes note of you clearly being offended and goes on to say, “Oh, chill out. I was just being real with you.”
I feel that this, unfortunately, may be the reality for a lot of us. Those of us who have friends that like to disguise their “criticism” as being tough love or just honest. Well my honest opinion that it’s not being “real” as some like to call it. It’s simply being cruel.
While there’s nothing wrong with someone offering his or her friend an opinion, or speaking up when he or she sees they’re doing something wrong, it’s completely different when that person is just relentlessly rude to them and scrutinizes every aspect of their life.
In my time, I’ve been relentlessly teased by a number of my friends and acquaintances. Not the fun, harmless teasing each other for laughs type of teasing. But the type of teasing that only results in someone getting hurt. Not helpfully calling you friends out on their mistakes, but deliberately scrutinizing everything they do.
My friends are people that I count on for support and encouragement, and in some cases, advice to guide me through tough situations. Not people I think will bring me down.
I wish I wasn’t able to recall so many times in which one of my friends felt the need to tear me down about the clothes I was wearing , how my hair looked, all things I tend to be very self-conscious about.
Telling me that my clothes are so ugly you’d never want to be seen with me, isn’t constructive criticism.
Telling me that I’m too lame for anyone to hang out with isn’t trying to help me out.
Both are nothing more than being a bully that’s tearing some else down and calling it being a good friend, and yes, both of these are things that have been said to me by a friend who claimed they were saying it for my own good.
I see this happening with other friends as well and I can’t help but be concerned. I hear people make jokes about her their “sensitive” friends should be more accepting of them being mean because it just means they care.
I feel like this is a mentality we need to move away from. Yes, tough love and being honest are great traits in a friend, but it is very possible to cross a line in which you go from being what keeps your friend happy to what makes them feel as if they cannot trust.
And that’s not something I would consider a “real” friend at all.
