Dear Prudence,
I’m in my mid-30s and I have a good friend in her early 20s that I’ll call “Mia.” Mia is an incredibly smart, sweet, wonderful person. She’s loyal, honest, intellectually curious, and super conscientious about seeing other points of view and treating everyone with kindness and grace. However, she has never had a relationship or even been asked out by a guy and is quite depressed about this. Worse, she seems to have begun to think that she’s boring, annoying, unfriendly, or otherwise a bad person because when she’s complained about this to her other friends and relatives, they all tell her the problem is her personality, not her looks, as she suspects. Of course, none of them can tell her exactly what’s apparently wrong with her, so she’s losing her mind trying to figure it out.
But it’s all those people who are nuts! Either that, or they’re fibbing for reasons I can’t quite get my head around. Mia has an amazing personality! I just think she could probably benefit from some facial plastic surgery, like the work I’ve had done. She’s already in great shape and has a killer sense of style. I would bet my last cent that her dating prospects after surgery versus before would be like night and day, just as it was for me. How bad would it be for me to gently tell her this? Is it really less hurtful to let her continue to think there’s something wrong with her as a person?