The Happiness Hour

Having close friends.

Prager defines a close friend as someone to whom you can open up. I dunno, sometimes people will open up to someone who's not close and whom they have no intention of getting close. In fact they'll keep the person distant just because they opened up to them.

Okay, this is a magnificent point: "My friends have made me a much better man."

Sounds to me like, "That's what friends are for."

I have a friend who got invoved with (and is still involved with) a rather crappy woman who wants to control him and treat him horribly. She doesn't know that's what she's doing, it's just how she relates to men and she can't be comfortable with a strong, confident man who trusts himself to make decisions and judgements. She found him in the "pool" of nerds who had never had a date in high school, and boy is he needy and desperate--desperate enough to put up with a constant stream of abuse, criticism, and invective. What's more, she's dumped him three times now, but he keeps crawling back for more.

Almost as soon as she met him she started hinting that his old friends were bad for him, that she was his only good thing going, and that he'd be much better off if he dumped us.

So he did.

Why would she do a thing like that? Were we really "keeping him down" or was it because she didn't want him to have a support structure that could tell him how bad for him she was? She's already kept him from enrolling in college, and made it very evident that he'd better get a job so he can move in with her. For six months she's been promising to get on birth control and has consistently refused to make an appointment to do that. By this time next year she will have forced him into moving in with her, marrying her, and siring a child by her. Because he has no friends, no feedback, no one who can help him see what a stinking low-life bitch she is.

This woman is NEVER going to make any man "a better man", she's only capable of making a man into a pile of crap, pretty much like herself.