When Are You Close Enough Friends To Urge Someone To Run Like Hell From Their Newest Paramour?

So I have met a new friend through spinning, let's call her Nancy. We go out for a sandwich or a drink sometimes after spin class and tomorrow, for the first time, we are both attempting, together, our first marathon four-hour class that supposedly knocks you on your rear end for a few days afterward.

I really like Nancy. She is almost 10 years younger than me, a single mother with a 10-year-old boy, and is really sweet, funny, smart, pretty -- but very lonely. She wants a boyfriend. She hasn't understood why she couldn't get one for so long after her marriage broke up. I keep telling her, feeling like some bitter old hag, to understand that a man is not the prize in life. The prize is her child, her happiness, her emotional well-being. The wrong man can screw all that up.

And boy, is she falling for the wrong man.

This guy is 50 and just out of his second marriage. In addition to the two marriages, he's also lived with two women for almost 10 years each, and had a child each with two of them. One of the women also had children from a previous marriage who grew very close to him throughout their seven-year marriage. Basically, since he was in his early 20s, he's jumped from one woman to the next with barely a single break.

The guy left every one of his wives and girlfriends, leaving a lot of broken-hearted women and children in his wake. Nancy actually knows one of his exes, who took her aside and tried to warn her about the fact that he is an effortless liar, a serial philanderer and a narcissist who needs BIG LOVE in his life all the time or else he gets bored and moves on to the next one. If the woman he's with fails to provide BIG LOVE almost constantly, he becomes resentful and looks elsewhere.

Nancy has convinced herself this woman is just bitter and is trying to sabotage his happiness because she still wants him for herself (I've met the guy briefly and how he gets so many chicks, I am not sure -- he looks a bit like Donald Trump but with slightly better hair ... ewwwwww.)

Anyway, I don't know what to say to Nancy. The guy has an excuse for every broken relationship, and in each case, including the case of his baby mommas -- one of whom he left for another woman while she was pregnant with his son -- it is the woman's fault for what went wrong. His women simply haven't appreciated his love. And this is the kicker -- all of the past relationships that have failed to make him happy, that he was driven out of by cruel and unloving women, have simply served to lead him to Nancy, the truest love of his life. Now his life has meaning! Now he knows what all the heartache was for! Uhhh-hhhuhhh.

I am the wrong person for Nancy to tell this story to, because I have my own complicated issues about love and commitment right now, but I have managed to listen to it for a few weeks as she ponders moving in with the guy. Impressively, I have managed not to kidnap this otherwise intelligent woman to save her and her child from the certain heartache that will come her way, perhaps not now, but at some point in the future.

All I can bring myself to do is to urge her not to ignore someone's patterns. Judge by someone's actions, not by his words. Look at his life. Do you HONESTLY believe all four of these women were awful, unloving shrews? He chose them. He loved them. So what does that say about him? And did they really turn on him? Or was he insufferable in some ways, causing them to turn on him?

I love women, I really do, but dear God we can be stupid about men sometimes when we're lonely and hurting. Nancy needs to take a step back and look at this guy intelligently and dispassionately because in all other areas of her life, she is so smart and successful and savvy. And yet for some reason she cannot. It is sad, but people have to make their own grim mistakes in life, I suppose. It's just hard to watch people do it when the gods seem to be shouting warnings from the sky: "Don't do it!!!!!"