A woman is rethinking her relationship after realizing her boyfriend’s idea of “radical honesty” might actually be an excuse to be unkind.
In a Reddit post, the 26-year-old explained that she has been dating her 27-year-old boyfriend for a little over a year. Early on, he told her that his friend group is “brutally honest,” which she assumed meant they just joked around and teased each other — until she saw what it really looked like.
According to her, the group follows an unspoken rule: if someone complains about their partner, that partner becomes “fair game” for feedback from everyone.
“I did not fully understand what that meant until last weekend,” she wrote.
While they were all hanging out, one of his friends casually turned to her and said, “So, did you ever fix that thing where you cry every time a plan changes?”
Everyone laughed, and then, one by one, they started listing things they thought she “should work on.”
“Like, ‘you apologize too much, it is kind of manipulative,’ ‘you act shy but actually you like control,’ ‘you talk about your job too much, it is boring for the rest of us,’” she recalled. “All delivered like they’re doing me a favor.”
Her boyfriend didn’t step in to stop it. Instead, he sat there nodding along and occasionally adding his own comments.
“I felt like I was in some live Yelp review of my personality,” she said. Later, when she told him how hurt she was, he dismissed her reaction, saying she was being dramatic and should be grateful they “care enough to be real” with her.
Now she’s torn: is she being too sensitive, or is this behavior genuinely out of line?
“Is this actually some healthy communication thing that my thin skin can’t handle, or is this just a circle of people who enjoy tearing others apart and slapping a self help label on it,” she asked Reddit.
Commenters overwhelmingly took her side and urged her to reconsider the relationship.
“Complaining to his friends and having them gang up on you is not radical honesty. He’s crowdsourcing his bullying. Gross,” one person wrote.
Another added, “Not ‘radical honesty,’ this is public shaming. He’s prioritizing his friends over your feelings, and that’s a red flag 🚩.”
A third summed it up simply: “Honesty without kindness is cruelty.”
