A sign of a good friend is telling someone the truth, even if it’s hard to hear. But how would you deal with a friend who is struggling with their love life, but doesn’t really want your honesty about why that is?
This 33-year-old man has a 35-year-old female friend who began dating again after getting out of a bad relationship and then taking some alone time.
His friend has always been on the bigger side, but that never negatively impacted her love life. Lately, she’s been stress eating because of relationship issues, work, and some personal matters, which means she’s put on a lot of weight in the last year.
He didn’t think there was a dramatic difference in his friend’s appearance, since they mainly talked on FaceTime, until they took a trip to a lake with some of their friends.
This was the first time he had seen his friend in six months, and then he could tell, standing there in front of her, that she had definitely gained weight.
The problem is that all of the photos his friend is using on a dating app are two years old, when she easily weighed 30 to 40 pounds less.
“She gets matches, flirts, exchanges numbers, and goes [on] dates, but so far none of them have lasted past the meeting phase. I initially told her, hey, that’s normal, it’s still new, and sometimes you meet someone, and it just doesn’t click, and she should just get out of her head about it,” he explained.
“Photos will be exchanged, but typically not a full body pic, or I’ve noticed she sometimes uses photos from angles that make her appear slimmer than she is.”
“The common denominator in literally every dating prospect is [that] things dry up after the first face-to-face meeting, and I genuinely think that it’s because her photos misrepresent her.”
His friend will turn to him for advice on her photos and ask him what features guys like or question him about whether her arms look fat in certain angles.
So far, he’s really only said to her that every guy has different tastes. He can tell that his friend is looking for encouragement, not his honest opinion.
His friend is gorgeous, she’s lovely, and she has a lot to offer a guy. He does think she deserves to find love, but he needs to be more honest with her about why her dating life is in trouble.
“But if I ever say something, even politely hinting that maybe the photos she’s presenting don’t reflect her current looks 100% faithfully, she kinda spirals,” he added.
“Not in a dramatic lashing out sort of way, but I can tell it hits on an insecurity, and she’s kind of running into the classic problem of she’s not interested in the people that are interested in her.”
“She was going to add in some of the photos from our recent group trip of her in a bikini but didn’t like how heavy she looked in them, specifically she had back rolls in a shot and asked me, ‘would backrolls be a deal breaker if you saw them?’ to which I admittedly sidestepped the question by being like, ‘everyone’s different, we’re not setting up the profile for me.'”
He’s not sure how to tell his friend the truth without hurting her feelings, but she really has to put more recent photos on her dating app profile.
How do you think he can be straight with his friend in the kindest way?
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By Bre Avery Zacharski
Hi, I'm Bre, Chip Chick's CEO! I have a degree in Textile/Surface Design from The Fashion Institute of Technology, and... More about Bre Avery Zacharski
