[Anonymous]

I have been with my boyfriend for about 2 1/2 years now and he is my best friend and treats me like a queen. The problem is his friends. When I am around them they act distant and usually don’t acknowledge my presence. I try to join in on their conversations and I usually just get ignored. Their attitude makes me feel awkward and I usually end up just not talking at all or just not even coming around them. One of them in particular is an egotystical jerk who has no respect for women, is only nice to me when he’s around just me and my bf, but is constantly is trying to demean me and make me feel like less of a person when we are in a group because he knows that I already feel uncomfortable because of their attitudes toward me. I am sick of the negative vibes they all send me when I am around and feeling like I shouldn’t be there and totally disrespected when I have done nothing to these people but try to be nice. I was actually friends with a couple of them before my boyfriend and I were together and they had crushes on me but we never dated. They treated me like a person then but now that respect is totally gone and I feel like a no one around them who is “interrupting” their guy time. Please help!

[Ask April Masini]

The solution is to try to introduce new friends into your circle. See if any of your girlfriends have boyfriends or husbands that your boyfriend would like. Start a social campaign to go out with other people, besides the haters, so that your boyfriend may find some new guys he wants to befriend who are respectful and kind to not just him, but you, too.

Also, include your families in this social campaign. See if there are family members on either side of yours and your boyfriend’s family, who you’d like to socialize with, who may become future good friends that the two of you can use to substitute for the guys who don’t respect you.

Rather than wage war against your boyfriend’s buddies, use sugar, not vinegar, to introduce some great new guys and gals into your social set and expand the people you do things with so eventually these negative buddies are a smaller part of your life than they are now.

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