Dear Luv Doc,
I truly can’t stand my best friend’s husband and it’s starting to affect our relationship. It pains me to say she has known this guy for more than 10 years. They met right after college and moved in together within six months. I was living in California at the time trying to finish up a degree. She would call me two or three times a week crying, saying how he would tell her she was overweight, or too flirty, or that she talked too much. They would break up, one of them would move out, and then a few months later they’d get back together. I know I probably said some mean things about him during those times, but after a while I decided that this was the life she was choosing, so I backed off on my critical comments. Two years ago, after moving back in with him for the fourth time, she told me they were getting married. Since then, I have been nothing but nice to her husband, and he has only been rude and dismissive toward me – sometimes outright insulting. Whenever I bring this up to her she always gets defensive. It has seriously made me question her judgment – and mine. Should I even be friends with her if she won’t even acknowledge that her husband treats me disrespectfully?
– Soon-to-Be Ex-Friend
My first instinct here is to tell you to go to war with your friend about what an absolute shitbag her husband is – just burn down your friendship like Sherman did to Atlanta on his March to the Sea. That idea is fucking stupid because it’s exactly the kind of advice you would expect to get from a bloviating old white dude who’s watched too many Ken Burns documentaries: a recommendation of some sort of insanely disproportionate response illustrated by an example from the Civil War – that halcyon era when people had a real handle on interpersonal relations. I mean, look, if everyone decided to go nuclear on their friends simply because of decades-long patterns of emotionally dysfunctional behavior, no one would have any friends. OK, to be fair, people would still have friends, but they wouldn’t have the kind of friends that make you feel superior; the kind of friends that provide you with hilariously salacious anecdotes at cocktail parties; the kind of friends that, when you tell other people those salacious anecdotes, they ask something like: “And why are you friends with this person again?”
The Civil War – that halcyon era when people had a real handle on interpersonal relations.
Come on. Everybody has those kinds of friends – the ones you can’t decide whether or not you should invite to your wedding, your company holiday party, your nephew’s bris: the sloppy drunk, the oversharer, the douche, the wannabe sex worker, the friend with abominable fashion sense … the list goes on and on, and somewhere in the bell curve of that list is the friend with the terrible spouse/partner. You put them on the guest list and you can be sure there’s going to be some drama … and perhaps a mathematical chance, however slight, that if they get too deep into the Manischewitz, little Levi could be left horribly disfigured. You don’t need that on your conscience – especially not when you’re just out here innocently trying to support some good old-fashioned culturally sanctioned genital mutilation.
So, if we can all agree that problematic friends are problematically unavoidable, what do we do with them? Chain them up in a box like the Gimp from Pulp Fiction? Send their calls straight to voicemail like one of those Gen Z psychopaths who only communicate through text? Or do we maybe throw ourselves on the grenade and see if we can somehow work things out? That last one is a personal growth strategy I wouldn’t wish on anybody, but lacking a more attractive alternative, it could do in a pinch.
You will have to start by clearly communicating the behavior you’re willing to accept when interacting with your friend’s husband. You can follow that up by outlining the consequences of him behaving otherwise – the primary of which should be for you to remove yourself from his presence – and hers – if the situation warrants. You don’t have to demand that she divorce her dickhead husband, you just have to make it clear that you’re not going to share her burden. In other words, if shit starts going bad, just leave. He’s not your husband, and he’s definitely not your friend.
Listen to The Luv Doc Podcast about this week’s Luv Doc column!This article appears in August 22 • 2025.
