What Do You Do When Your Friends Hate Your Man?

Tara Joyce's best friend had a boyfriend who drilled in her friend's head that she should diet (despite already being thin) and that she should get regular Brazilian waxes (even though she really didn't want to). His influence became too much for Tara, and she felt she needed to start saying something. "You just try to drill it in her head that you think she should have a greater sense of self-worth and not be with this guy. Boyfriends are supposed to make you feel like the best person in the world, not the worst person." Tara told her friend repeatedly that she should ditch the guy but the friend stayed with the guy anyway. "My friend would casually mention something rude that her boyfriend said or did, and I would become so mad at him that I almost felt inclined to leave our lunches early. He was influencing the friendship when he wasn't even there."

However, Jennifer Kelton has a pointed take on such a situation: If friends tell someone that they think her guy is bad news and she stays with him, she loses the right to vent about him at lunch or during girls' night out. "If you know that your friends don't like him, then you're wasting their time talking about him. You should say nothing, because you're just a big whiner at this point," Kelton says. What's Your Boyfriend Or Husband Criteria?

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Says Kate, a twentysomething living in upstate New York, "If a girl's boyfriend has done something that makes her friends angry at him, he probably did something really stupid... but I think that there is a way to make it up and the boyfriend can somehow restore his impression with her friends." Kate channels the Sex and the City movie to back up her argument. "I think that Charlotte knows that Carrie really loves Big and Charlotte wants to see them happy together. She does curse the day Big was born... but that's only because he hurt her best friend and at that moment in time she wanted him gone." But Kate also says, "Charlotte is so marriage crazed that she wouldn't care if Carrie was marrying a bum from the subway."