I just watched 'American Murder: The Family Next Door' for the second time. But this time, through a new lens, I saw unwitting culprits in the story: the well-intentioned friends.

For those unfamiliar, the Netflix documentary covers the story of a man who killed his wife and their young children in order to be with a different woman. Leading up to the murder, the wife knows something is seriously amiss. Her husband's behavior has changed. He's absent physically and emotionally, he's not coming home on time, he's not in regular communication with her or his children, and he's not having sex with her. She texts her friends every step of the way, conveying her deep concerns, and wondering out loud if he is cheating.

Her friends tell her "awww tell him how you feel" (communicate). They tell her to initiate sex with him. They tell her that he would never cheat on her, that he loves her so much, he would kill for her. When things continue to deteriorate, they finally agree that something must be wrong, but not to fret because "at least he said he wanted to work through it".

This woman knew he was cheating- not from some magical "gut" feeling, as we sometimes like to call it, but from the intelligent observation and experience of millions of pieces of data gathered over a number of years, that allowed her to recognize significant deviations from an established behavioral pattern in her mate.

She knew because she had the observational data to back it up.

When confronting him, he predictably gaslights her. He tells her that he's not cheating. In an attempt to cover his tracks and cater to his selfish, cowardly desires, he makes her feel crazy.

But when talking to her friends, it is sadly just as predictable that they invalidate her. In an attempt to make her feel better and tamper down her worries, they too, make her feel crazy.

She's now left all alone, with no one to really hear her. No one to believe her. And so she doesn't believe herself. She focuses her energy on constructing theories to explain what else it could be, pointing the finger back, inevitably, at herself. Maybe she is to blame, maybe she emasculated him by standing up to his parents...maybe, maybe, maybe.

There are so many maybes, many of them propped up by her well-intentioned friends, that they obfuscate what she really sees. They demagnetize her compass.

It wasn't long before she and her children were dead. But not before she threw herself at this man, writing love letters professing her undying devotion and willingness to 'try', and not before she wept in the dark after her attempts at intimacy were roundly rejected.

Would she have done these things if her friends hadn't completely invalidated her experience and her interpretation of her own husband's actions? Would she have acted in a way which could have led to if not to the protection of her self-respect, then to the protection of her very life? Her children's lives?

It goes without saying that the culpability for violence rests solely with the perpetrator. But that doesn't mean that bad advice from well-intentioned friends doesn't matter.

I'd be willing to bet that most of us have had the experience of our friends' 'positive', yet invalidating perspectives leading us like lambs to emotional slaughter.

Now I'll make it about me. The stakes exponentially lower, and my troubles a paradise in comparison, I draw some parallels:

Perhaps the most painful part about being single for 10 years is not the loneliness, the ache of untouched skin, or the consistent disappointment and rejection. It's the invalidation of my friends every step of the way.

I tell my friends everything. Every detail of my life is shared, including the text conversations and minor nuances of dates. I'm so blessed to have friends who care to listen and weed through the monotonous details with me.

But nearly every time I do, I'm invalidated. If I tell my friends that I know a guy isn't interested (because, if he wanted to he would), they tell me that it couldn't possibly be the case.

There was the time when a guy I was dating (and had big, big feelings for) was suddenly canceling our dates at the last minute citing intestinal issues, they told me maybe he just got too drunk playing golf the day before. Maybe he likes me so much he couldn't allow me to see him hungover. When I told them that it wasn't first time he had cancelled, and that I would expect a man who really liked me to make sure that didn't drink too much prior to a date, they suggested maybe he was an alcoholic and he could not help himself.

When this man began isolating our dates to weekdays, I had a strong hunch (due to a few data points I had collected) that he began seeing someone else from his past on the weekends, but wanted to keep me on back-burner as his "Tuesday night" girl. My friends questioned how I could possibly know that and suggested I refrain from letting my mind wander to negative stories.

Despite my friends' advice, I finally broke it off with him. A month or so later, he changed his facebook profile picture. It was him and his ex-girlfriend. Well, ex-girlfriend turned girlfriend again. In the weeks that followed, I found myself on the floor, hiding behind a cubicle at work, weeping. More than once.

Then there was the time when a friend of mine chastised me for walking away from a dance floor under a string light-lit night sky where a man nearby was 'looking' at me. No doubt tired of seeing me struggle with finding a relationship for so many years, she believed she had just discovered the problem: I wasn't picking up on cues when men were interested in me. I was so incredibly intimidatingly gorgeous, that I needed to make myself more available to men, so as to encourage them to approach me.

I spent the next 15 minutes explaining two things: 1) when men are legitimately interested, they will find a way to make contact, no matter how shy they are and 2) it was likely that this fellow had a girlfriend who would be showing up in the next hour.

My friend scoffed as though I was some kind of ridiculous, cynical know-it-all. No, I tried to tell her. I have data! Hundreds of experiences have led me to make this prediction. When a man is 'looking' at me, but he doesn't approach me, I have done some mix of the following: wonder if I should make a move, flash a smile or two, attempt to make eye contact, put my body nearer to his orbit, strike a conversation, and wonder what the hell went wrong. All of that and fast forward an hour or two, his very hot girlfriend shows up. It's simple: if he wanted to, he would. If he isn't, there's a reason.

Not 15 minutes later, I look across the lawn and what do I see, but this lookie-loo man snuggling up with who must be his girlfriend, who had just arrived. I tap my friend and point in their direction. "See?"

"Holy shit." she says.

"Yeah." I say, and proceed to break down and cry under the moon, surrounded by our friends.

I wasn't even interested in this guy. He was acting like a fool and was not my type. But the experience underscored a painful, long-lasting struggle. Thinking the world of me, my friends are incapable of accepting scenarios in which men do not return my interest. In their attempts to make me feel better and downplay my worries, they used to make me feel crazy. But now I know better. Now, they just make me feel alone.

Thanks to FDS, I've been able to better articulate my dating perspectives with my friends in a way that aligns with my lived experiences. It's been challenging, the arguments can be drawn-out, and they feel more defensive than I like. I'm making progress, but it still feels almost combative. If you have any suggestions on how to gain alignment with your friends on what are essentially FDS principles in dating, I would love to hear them.