Answering the prompt: “Do I know anyone who is part of a MLM?” So living on the westside of Michigan, you obviously hear about plenty of people that are involved in Amway, or at least I did at one point. It feels a little bit less common now. But I had a friend in college who — I won’t say the relationship ended entirely because of the MLM, but that certainly did not help.
So my experience with her was I was dating someone that lived in a different country at the time and, you know, we had been really good friends, she and I, for a long time. And so he was visiting. I think it might have been the first time he was coming to the US and she wanted to meet him, which totally normal. And we went out. It was herself and her husband and then me and my partner at the time. And, you know, we had a perfectly unremarkable dinner, it was fine, no red flags. And then my partner went home — he was here for a couple weeks — and he messaged me and said “Hey, like, what is Amway?” Or you know, “What is, what is this?” And I was like, “Why are you asking me that?” And he said that shortly after — I, I guess we must have met up with her like right before he left. So a couple days later we’ll say, he’s asking me what Amway is and it turned out she’d reached out to him and basically pitched it as like “I would like you to be the Irish arm of my, of my pyramid. You know, this will make us a lot of money.” And so it just put him in a really weird position because this is a new friend of mine — or a new friend that he had met of mine and he didn’t really want to like, be rude and say no but he’s obviously really uncomfortable.
So I, I reached out to her and said, “Hey like that wasn’t totally cool, you know, to put him in a weird position. Like you don’t know him, you met him for an hour, whatever it was that we were out for dinner. And basically I would have appreciated it if you’d gone through me first.” And this was not the first time I’d actually had that conversation with her. She had reached out — this is very convoluted — she had reached out to friends of my brothers. So not my brothers, but some other buddies, about Amway and she knew them very, very tangentially like through that chain I just described and so when she originally reached out, I had them texting me saying like “Hey, I got a really weird message from your friend, [Name]. I’m assuming it’s something like Amway. Is that true?” And I confirmed. “Yep. I know she’s involved. So it probably is. Like, I would ignore it if I were you.” And she had done that with other friends, like reached out to their siblings and the other friends — like mutual friends of ours had also said, “Please don’t do that. If you’re gonna reach out to someone who I know like, please let me know. It’s really off-putting for you to reach out to them ’cause they might think something’s wrong or they, you know, they don’t understand why they’re hearing from you and then it’s — you know, they’re put in this position where they have to say no ‘cause very few people are interested in getting involved in Amway.”
So she was already kind of, like, sensitive about us saying that. And so when I said to her, “Hey like that was not great. Please don’t do that with my partner,” it was so bizarre because she responded and said something to the effect of “I’m sorry that you’re not secure enough in your relationship to have other girls, like, talk to your partner.” And I was like, “Whoa, dude, like, that’s not what this is. Please don’t try to make me out to be like, hysterical or in- — what’s the word I’m looking for — uh, insecure.”
So, um, yeah, it was kind of a culmination of a lot of different things that ended that friendship, but that was not a small part of it where I was kind of just like, you don’t know me, clearly, if that’s the angle you’re trying to take right now and there’s like a lack of personal responsibility where it’s like you can do Amway if that’s what you wanna do and you should also grow a thick skin and be able to respect when people say “Here’s my boundary” or “Not interested” or “Don’t contact me or my family.” Um, it might hurt you if you really believe in this mission, this cause, and I’m sorry. But yeah, it was really messy and not very pleasant. So, I do not have, uh, good feelings about Amway.