Help! My friend is a serial loser-dater!

Dear Amie, my girlfriend has the worst taste in men. She doesn’t have a type other than they all let her down or ghost her or take advantage and she just cops it until they disappear and then her heart is broken and the cycle continues. How can I get her to see the red flags before they hit her in the face?

Ugh… The reality is, most of us have invested emotion into and dated someone we should have only fucked once. And we stayed with them until the bitter end because we thought they might change, despite our friends predictions that it would end in a flaming trainwreck. Spoiler: they didn’t change and the relationship did indeed end in a flaming emotional trainwreck. But, the next time we dated, we were more cautious… we’d learned from our douche bag mistakes… and we looked out for those red flags in our next partner and avoided them like the plague. Well, some of us do that… while some of our friends just jump straight onto the next train that’s showing all the signs of being about to fly off the rails.

Unfortunately, we all have that friend who is a serial loser-dater. 

I feel your pain. It’s infuriating because you know that when it falls to pieces, you’ll be the one who’s on emotional life support duty for your mate.

Since you’ve said it’s a pattern for your friend, there has to be something bigger at play going on for her. 

You’ve got a few options. You can sit your mate down and have an invention. Crack open the Rose and lay out the evidence of her history of dating douche bags (fuck, get a Powerpoint presentation if you have to) and tell her to have some self respect and stop dating idiots… which will probably result in sparking a massive shit fight with your friend. Gets the point across but is probably not an ideal solution. Or you can be more subtle about it going forward…

The next time she starts dating a dickhead, don’t call out her behaviour, call out his… but in a crafty way. 

Say she’s dating a sleaze bag, don’t make any accusations, give her some examples. Say you’ve caught him blatantly creeping on someone else, ask your friend straight up how she feels about that. If she’s dating someone who is a critic – who puts her down, tells her she could do with losing some weight or is just generally critical of her, tell her he’s wrong and that she’s great just as she is. If she starting dating a jerk who is a user – who only texts her when he wants something or borrows money off her without paying it back – ask her why she’s afraid of saying no to him. Tell her it’s shit that he’s using her and she deserves more. Build up her self confidence.

Unfortunately some people stick with shit partners because they’re desperate – they don’t think they can do any better. That’s dumb. You shouldn’t have to settle for shit. Finding a good partner requires a combination of heart, head, a hell of a lot of self-awareness and good friends to call out the shit when they see it.

Good luck!