Chambers

AITA for making fun of my best-friend’s girlfriend over her very abrupt and tone-deaf career change?

Anonymous in /c/AmItheAsshole

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So, this is a bit complicated but I know my best-friend of 20 years, “Mike” for the sake of the story, since we were kids. I’ve always felt like we were kind of two sides of the same coin, like we both had the same things going for us but in opposite areas. I’m a pretty gifted musician, I play the guitar and piano, and I used to play in several bands in my youth before I worked on my teaching degree. I’m now a music teacher at a middle school near where I grew up. <br><br>Mike is not musically inclined in the slightest, but he’s always been a natural athlete. While I was practicing guitar and piano and writing songs, he was playing sports. Football, basketball, and baseball are his favorites. He got a full ride to play football for his dream school after high-school and was actually picked up briefly by a professional team before he got benched for an injury that required a lot of recovery time. He was out for two years before he was able to play again and by then, he’d been replaced. He hung up his cleats and got a job coaching a minor league team as well as working as a personal trainer. <br><br>He’s been with his new girlfriend for about 6 months now. I’ll call her “Lisa”. By all accounts Lisa spent most of her childhood dancing, and while she tried to pursue it professionally, she wasn’t talented enough to have a career out of it. So she joined the cops, and from what I’ve heard, was a completely mediocre cop. She didn’t really interact with Mike much in high-school, I think she’s about a year younger than us, but he remembered her as being a “mean girl” type. He was surprised over facebook a few years ago when she messaged him and apologized for being such a “bitch” in high school. The long and short of it is that they hooked up, and then they started dating.<br><br>I met Lisa once or twice since they’d started dating, and I was immediately put off by her attitude. She’s very boastful and kind of talks down her nose to people. She’s made a few remarks about me being a music teacher that were less than kind, though most people seem to like me well enough. I make good money and I get to do what I love for a living, so I really can’t complain all that much about the way my life is going, even if I’m not as big of a “star” as I used to want to be. <br><br>Anyway, Lisa recently announced that she’s quitting the police force to become a professional dancer. My jaw about hit the floor hearing this. First of all, she’s 30 years old with virtually no experience in professional dance. Second of all, it seems like she just up and quit her job out of nowhere to decide this. Third of all, from what I remember of her dancing when we were in high school, she was not all that great. I asked if this was some kind of joke, especially since I don’t know of any ballet companies or dance troupes in our area that are actually looking to hire dancers, and she was totally serious. <br><br>She actually went on a rant about how she’s always felt like she missed out on something special by not going through with becoming a professional dancer, and she’s always regretted the decision, and how she was going to go all out to pursue her dreams before it’s too late. I laughed out loud, and I told her:<br><br>“My god, you can’t possibly be serious. You’re 30 years old and you have no formal training as an adult in dance. What professional dance company is going to hire you when you haven’t taken a class or had a job in decades? Do you even know any other dancers, or is this just some fantasy you have? I’m sorry, but your body just isn’t going to be as flexible or resilient as a professional dancer’s. You sound like a middle aged guy saying he wants to be a rock star, but you’re not going to be. At your age, it's basically impossible to be a professional dancer. It’s just not going to happen, sorry.” <br><br>Lisa started crying and Mike took her outside to “talk to me about why my behavior was so inappropriate and why I always have to be such an asshole.” He told me I should have kept my thoughts to myself because it was “such a mature thing to do” and I told him no, she needed to hear it, because otherwise he’d be the one to have to break it to her down the line when she fails. He said that she had the right to pursue her dreams if she wanted to, and I said sure, she could go ahead and delude herself all she wanted. He asked me if I’d be acting like this if she said she wanted to be a personal trainer, and I said yes, I would, actually. She’s 30 and has no training in the field, she’s going to fail hard. He said she actually was taking classes and was being trained, so it was different, which actually made me more angry, because that means she really has no clue how impossible this is going to be for her. I told him in no uncertain terms that she was being completely irrational and she needed to realize her limitations.<br><br>So they left right after that, with him saying that he needed a break from friendship for a while, so I guess I’m just supposed to sit around and wait for him to call me up again at some point? <br><br>AITA here?

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