You don’t develop courage by being happy in your relationships everyday. You develop it by surviving difficult times and challenging adversity. –Epicurus

Throughout my short life, I feel as though I’ve been handed a fairly good deck of cards. I’m the baby of an enormous family and because I’m the spitting image of my paternal grandmother, I was always everyone’s favorite. I have this insane, innate musical gift that has allowed me to excel without even trying. I was always just smart enough, just pretty enough, and just rich enough to get by in society unscathed.

Sure, I’ve made disgusting choices, drank cheap liquor and dated awful men but in all honesty, my life has been pretty amazing thus far. I have a warm, welcoming European family who has always spoiled me absolutely rotten (I may as well have been Meadow Soprano.), a gift of music and mild intelligence, as well as natural olive skin. I got lucky in love before I was twenty-five and bought the first wedding dress that I tried on. For $300 plus alterations. I’m not trying to brag friends, but I have been very, very lucky. I have more now than most people get in their entire lives.

But all these gifts from nature, God and whoever else (my mom has got these great shaped eyes…), also come with stipulations. One of my favorite John Legend songs talks exactly about this. “Sometimes the price of what you gave to me is I can’t stop questioning,” he speaks to God in the song. The truth is that although I am obviously eternally grateful, all of these legacies and allowances have left me somewhat of a weakling.

I mean, not in every sense of the word because believe me, I can more than take care of myself. (And my husband would probably be starving and living in a filth ridden cat factory if anything life threatening ever happened to me.) But there are times when I find myself whining to one of my very dearest friends and she’ll blink her big brown eyes at me and say, “Just keep living.” I guess that sometimes, when things come so easily and you’ve been blessed so immensely, it’s easy to get tripped up and forget all that you’ve been given.

There are moments when life gets crazy, when the world appears to be crumbling around you, when days turn into weeks and suddenly, you’ve lost control. There are moments when life requires momentum. Necessity is the mother of invention and sometimes you need tough love. Because sometimes, despite your intentions, life becomes a scrambled, havoc wreaked disaster of a mess.

A person isn’t who they are during the last conversation you had with them. They’re who they’ve been throughout your whole relationship. –Rainer Maria Rilke

So, I have this friend who is married to a man with a similar background to my own. They have a relatively good relationship from what I understand but I don’t ask too many questions. I learned my lesson long ago about getting involved in other people’s interpersonal relationships but they appear to be outwardly happy. (Although so were Cal and Rose and look how that ended up: she spit in his face and jumped ship with a vagrant from Michigan! I know, good pun, right?)

Anyway, one day I was driving down the road and I see this married man speeding down the opposite lane next to me. He was on some sort of a presumable Sunday drive with an unidentified woman. I’m sure you can imagine my look of surprise when I saw him, being all jovial with someone who wasn’t his unsuspecting wife. I practically got whiplash because I was so engrossed in the show that I couldn’t stop staring! Thankfully, he never saw me but I mean, what kind of idiot would just go gallivanting through town, in broad freaking daylight, without a care in the world, his hair blowing in the breeze with a woman who WASN’T his wife? How embarrassing for everyone involved, I mean, seriously?

Okay listen, friends. Don’t misunderstand because I get how the world works. I mean, I am literally going to a university to earn a degree in the study of humans and their behavior. I understand that people have this warped brand of ethics. I realize that almost all men are dogs and that cheating is commonplace among relationships, even though it shouldn’t be. But here’s the thing, no matter how close a friend or how much you care about someone, getting involved in these types of situations gets messy. It doesn’t matter what you think you know, what you swear you saw or heard, or who you believe is right, these things get ugly and taxing.

But at the same time, love is not crippling. It can be tough sometimes but it’s not crippling.

I have this problem with tough love because where is the line in getting over involved? I know that sometimes people like me, who are inherently passionate and sometimes irrational, need to be brought back down to earth a little bit. There are situations where people need tough love because coddling isn’t always a resolution worth changing for. There are times when people need to be shocked back to reality.

It is not true that everyone is special. It is true that everyone was once special and still possesses the ability to recover it. –Criss Jami

Here is a purely hypothetical example: Let’s say that I have a friend named Candy or Bambie, or something else resembling a cocktail waitress turned stripper. Let’s pretend that Bambie is dating a man who habitually cheats on her. Let’s visualize that he cheats on her so much, in fact, that she has contracted a sexually transmitted disease from him. And we’ll make it something curable, for the sake of the example. Oh, I don’t know, something like Chlamydia.

So anyway, one day, during the proverbial alcohol soaked lunch that we’re bound to engage in, she chronicles the more recent series of events for me. She tells me that she’s caught him cheating yet again. She caught him in some stupid lie about where he allegedly was because he slipped up and wrecked his car. Listen to me friends, in these stories, the truth always comes out. I don’t care. And it’s usually over something purely accidental like running a red light and rear ending the safe driver in front of you. I’m just saying, these are facts.

Anyway, so I sit and I listen and I mumble to the waitress to make it a double because obviously, this situation certainly merits such drastic measures. What I want to say to Bambie is, “You’re the bigger idiot because you took him back. Again. Even after he spread a disease to you that he contracted from some slutty, home wrecking twit.” But obviously, I don’t say that because like I said, I learned long ago not to get involved in people’s lives. More especially, their love lives. Primarily because it isn’t my business. I mean, I don’t have to sleep beside the venereal diseased carrier monkey so why should I care, right?

Instead, the hypothetical version of myself is outwardly supportive. I say something along the lines of, “You’re my homegirl and I love you. Do what makes you happy because whether you are or you’re not, I’m still going to be here.”

Well played.

Stop begging God to increase your territory when you can’t even maintain the territory you already have. Work with what you’ve got first. –Nakia R. Laushaul

Here’s my ailment: Given the premise of the aforementioned “tough love”, some would argue that I should be way more forthcoming about my opinions about the idiot boyfriend. Tough love suggests that I should say, “Bambie, you’re out of your mind if you think this behavior is acceptable. Kick him to the curb and preserve the minute amount of dignity you have left.” But let’s be real: Who am I, Dr. Phil? What gives me the right to dictate what anyone, homegirl or otherwise, does with their life?

I mean, I suppose if Bambie was addicted to heroin or crystal meth, or was on the run from the cops for committing a federal crime, the choice would be inevitably clear. It’d be so much easier to tell Bambie she was breaking the law and destroying her body without the fear of butting into her life. Because really, what is tough love if not an attempt to steer people back home? To get them to grasp the severity of their situation?

Moral of the Crazy: For all intents and purposes, tough love can be defined as caring about someone enough to be harsh with them in order for them to understand. For people like me, such a task can be really difficult because it isn’t pleasant to just butt into someone’s personal business. I mean, how many songs does Britney Spears have to release to prove that she allegedly doesn’t care what people think? (Although, the psych major in me would say, if she really didn’t care, she wouldn’t sing about it on a semi-regular basis…) The point is that people don’t like being told what to do. People don’t like being patronized. They don’t like having their lives assessed by someone else, even if they ask for the help. (Cue Overprotected, My Prerogative, I’m Not a Girl (Not Yet a Woman), Piece of Me and What It’s Like to Be Me)

So what do you do? Where is the line? What about tough love?

The truth is that sometimes tough love is merited. And it doesn’t always end up like the Cosby Show or some crappy after school special. Sometimes when you’re up front and totally honest, although everyone claims it’s what they’d prefer to hear, it hurts people’s feelings. And then you look like an ice queen.

One of my oldest and dearest friends once said to me when I came to her with a problem: Katie, you just have to be honest. They may get pissed but they’ll either come around or they won’t. But at least you know that you stayed true to yourself.” Granted, this friend of mine, not to sound too much like my paisano father, but she don’t take no shit. However, I like to believe her words of wisdom are useful to all of us.

Because it isn’t always easy to come clean. But sometimes you’ve got to. Because whether they’re happy or they’re not, you’re always going to be there to love them, give them a warm hug, and have a stiff drink with them when shit hits the fan.

Because that’s tough love.

Nothing is perfect. Life is messy. Relationships are complex. Outcomes are uncertain. People are irrational. –Hugh Mackay