By: So It Goes
In the game of chess, you are taught to constantly examine the entire board in an effort to see two, three, five, ten moves ahead. This might work for chess but in the game of love and advice, we forget that we sometimes have to look ahead and see if our well-meaning advice can in any way be used to checkmate ourselves.
I have a friend named Bill.
Extremely passionate and intelligent in his professional life, his love life was a mish-mash of missed connections and bad timing. Sometimes it was his eccentricities that would drive a girl away. Other times it was overpowering neediness.
A few years ago, he started online dating and met a young lady and they began a serious relationship. After a few months, she was starting to show what I saw as some warning signs. She would sometimes cry at a party. She would become irritated if Bill was hanging out late with friends or if he showed too much interest in sports.
He was beginning to question whether he should stick it out because the other things in their world (music, politics, sports teams, food, Coke v Pepsi, astrological-chart) all lined up. Around this time, he and I went out for lunch and he asked me for my take on the situation. I had been waiting for this.
“You have to dump her and find another girl. There have to be thousands, right?”
The words fell out of my mouth and slipped past his ears and into his brain. My statement was a gamble and that brief moment in a decade-long friendship set off a chain-reaction of me vs. her.
Three years later, Bill and I still don’t speak much and he and his now-wife are having their first child in January.
Now, certainly honesty is the best policy and I am sure we all have that friend or relative who absolutely relishes “telling it like it is” and finishing their conversational uppercuts with a touchdown dance. The mistake I made was not realizing that when it comes to situations where people are heavily invested emotionally, when you take such a clear stance on one side of an issue, you sometimes end up standing on the other side.
Alone.
And while I believe that you should always tell the truth, I also believe that applies more to matters involving mothers, the police, and any type of run-in with the Secret Service.
Sometimes it is better to be silent.
