"After I’d finally left my abusive ex-husband, I’d wished someone had told me to get out earlier than I did, so my girlfriend and I made a pact that if either of us thought the other was in a bad relationship, we would tell the person," my friend, we'll call her Sally, tells me the other day over lunch. "Well, now she's seeing this guy who lies and is basically not a nice person. But when I told her what I thought, she ended up hating me for it."

Why is it so hard to listen to our friends when we're in love?

"I'm stubborn and I don't like to admit when I'm wrong or am making bad relationship choices," offers another friend, Julie, who continued to convince herself that some guy was perfect for her even after he started seeing someone else.

Even if we're self-aware enough to know we're making mistakes, she adds, we hate to hear it from someone else.

"I think that's why we get defensive," Julie suggests. "We often know we're being foolish, but we need our friends to say, 'Yeah, you are, but it'll all turn out OK, no matter what happens with the relationship.'"

In other words, we want our friends to lie?

Not exactly. But when friends say negative things like, "Well, I hope you know what you're doing," or "You said this the last time about that other guy," it can feel like people who are supposed to be our peers, not our superiors, are scolding us.

So we're forced to sit back and watch our friends screw up their lives. And it's painful. It's far more tempting to try to save them.

But chances are, if you do, you'll just end up with two bad relationships: the one between you and your friend, and the one between your friend and her squeeze, to whom she's now clinging, more determined than ever to prove you wrong.

If you're lucky, she'll eventually leave the relationship and you can commiserate about how crappy the whole thing was. On the other hand, your friend may harbour a nice healthy resentment for you — that is, if she's still speaking to you — especially if she believes that your disapproval was the reason for the breakup.

I've discovered it's best to keep your honest opinions to yourself when it comes to friends’ relationships. Apparently so did that same friend who hated Sally for telling her the truth. That’s what she did when Sally was with her abusive ex. "She was there for me when I left him but she never let on that she couldn't stand him," Sally tells me. "She was a bigger person than me in that way."

Because even Sally admits that, though she wishes her friends had been more honest and direct with her when she was with her ex, she’s not sure that she necessarily would have left, even if a friend flat out told her to. She simply wasn't ready.

As much as we'd like to think it's best to be honest with, rather than coddle our friends, people do what they want and it's better to be there for a friend even if you're not completely behind what she is doing. At least then, your friendship will still be intact if, and hopefully when, the bad relationship falls apart.

Still, it's hard to watch people make the same kind of mistakes you've made yourself. This happened recently with a dear friend — aspects of her relationship were red flags to me, signaling problems I'd had in a past relationship that ended very badly.

She accused me of projecting my own relationship history onto her current situation. She was probably partly right. I, of course, thought she was in denial and was offended that she wasn't open to learning from my own experience.

Ultimately, things worked out for her and I had to admit I was wrong — well, mostly. But worse than being, um, sort of, wrong, is this struggle to get our friendship back to where we were pre-showdown.

It's hard not to share your opinions, though, especially if you feel like you've finally figured out what it takes to have a healthy relationship. Naturally you want the same for your friends and believe they just need to follow your lead. You become like the Jimmy Swaggart of relationships.

That's not to say you shouldn't be supportive and available for consultation or advice. Just be careful and remember that your friends are not you. While you want to protect them from the pain and heartaches you've suffered, every relationship is different. What didn't work for you, might work for them.