How To Help Your Friends With Their Love Lives — Without Getting Drained

Supportive friendships are a lifeline for many of us, especially when we face various challenges in our love lives. Friends provide us with much-needed perspective when we overanalyze, offer reassurance when we feel insecure, and build us up when others disappoint us. And we are eager to help each other with our relationship problems because mutual support is essential to strong and healthy friendships.

But sometimes, we may feel that the help we offer is not enough, not satisfying, or not helping our friends. No matter how much we try, the time and energy that we invest fail to improve the situation and drain the resources we need for our own well-being. Perhaps we stay up too late on the phone with our distraught friends each night, cancel our appointments to be available whenever a crisis comes up, or are invested in a plan of action that they refuse to adopt. Maybe our determination to fix their love lives even creates discord in the relationships with the very friends we are trying to help.

Giving advice is tricky. By providing advice, we prevent our friends from digging deep within themselves and figuring out what is true for them. And giving advice can backfire on us. Our friends might come back to us and say, "I did what you said to do, and we had an awful fight!" or "I did what you suggested. We are back together, but I'm not sure I want to be."

As our friends think of what they want to do about their relationships, they may ask, "What would you do?" When we choose to answer that question, we do well to say, "I would likely (fill in the blank), but that is me, not you. I'm here to help you know what is right for you."

One way to support your friend as they problem-solve without giving advice is to encourage them to come up with a few of their own ideas.

If they exclaim, "I don't know what to do!" you can say, "It sounds like you are not ready to do something about your relationship. That's OK. What would make you happy? What does your gut tell you?"

Then, you can help them imagine various outcomes. Ask them to think through their options, and ask them questions like, "How would that work out?" or "How might you feel about that?"

In this way, we can help our friends do their own thinking and action planning.

When our friends call us upset about their love relationships, it's difficult to discuss anything else. That's what preoccupies them. But while we want to help them, we don't want to join them in their rumination. To set healthy boundaries, you might suggest, "How about we talk for a while about you and your relationship, and then let's talk about what else is going on in our lives. Stepping away from that situation might do you some good, and I would love to hear more about your new job."

Or maybe you want to take a break from talking or texting and go out on a walk together, find a new outdoor place to explore, or try a new restaurant or cafe. You can find ways to change the scenery, change the dialogue, and change the energy to focus on things other than relationship problems.

When you start to feel fatigued by your friends' relationship problems, you should notice those feelings and respond to them. "I have to go in 15 minutes," you may say. Or if they call and you can't talk, you can tell them, "I can talk later today, but not now."