interfere or not?

iVillage Member
Registered: 07-29-2004
interfere or not?
1
Tue, 07-19-2005 - 4:42am

a friend (a guy) recently became engaged. my BF and i are both concerned that he is making a big mistake. it seems obvious to us that this couple is headed for divorce - mostly for financial reasons. the guy works in a commission-based job, so the amount of money he makes varies from day to day... his fiancee calls him every day the minute the workday ends to find out exactly how much money he made. apparently she's been doing this for as long as they've been dating, which seems awfully out-of-place and controlling... worse yet, he lies to her about it. a lot. my BF recently discovered that this guy keeps a spreadsheet to keep track of the lies, so that the numbers will all add up consistently. this whole thing just seems so messed up. how can this be a good foundation for a marriage?

my BF is considering saying something. he says he knows he may lose the guy as a friend, but he doesn't care, if it will make his friend stop and think for a second before he royally screws up his life. i don't think he should interfere... the guy must realize what he's doing, right? but i'm torn. what do you guys think?

iVillage Member
Registered: 01-06-2004
In reply to: vivinny
Tue, 07-19-2005 - 8:18am

It's a tough call. Maybe he can do what I have been doing with a friend who is already married but things seem a little rough. What I try to do is just take about realtionships in general terms or mention soemthing that I think my relationship with my fiance great that theirs seems to be lacking, just to make her think about it.

For example, she has credit cards he doesn't know about. So I mentioned how understanding my fiance was about my credit card debt when I told him (which I actually did when we were first seeing each other, but hey, she can't go back in time). I told her how we came up with a plan to get rid of it together and how he even understood that we were going to have to undo some of our hard work to pay for the wedding.

I know guys generally don't just talk about relationhsips with each other, but maybe when his friend makes a comment about the spreadsheet or his gf's asking about it he could start a conversation about it without implying what he should do about it and let his friend draw his own conclusions. Like he could say something like, "Whoa, don't you think that's a little extreme. I mean there's no way I could handle it if my gf did that? I'm glad we can talk about money and that we're on the same page about spending and saving. Maybe you should talk to her and see if she'll chill out."

If his friend says he can't talk to her about that. Then he could continue by saying, "You know I don't want to tell you who should want to spend your life with, but don't you think it would nice if you could talk to her about stuff?"

I don't know exactly how he could translate that into guy talk, but I'm sure there's some way he could get his friend thinking without interfering too heavily.