Close friend is having trouble in his dating life[Gf's a influencer]
So this story is about my close friend from college. He’s been dating this girl- let's call her "Alia" from our college group for the last 3-4 years, so she’s a friend of mine as well. Initially, it started out great. Both loved each other and were happy. Alia was always a social media addicted person. A couple of years back, she decided she wanted to be a social media influencer full-time. My friend supported her in this decision. Right now, she has around 30k+ followers. Now the problem starts
While all this was happening, we all saw the change in the behaviour of my friend and Alia. Earlier, we all had a great time together, but everything's changed now. Now all our outings, dinners, or even get-togethers serve as content for Alia. She would record everything that we did together as friends and post it on her account. It was fine in the beginning, but now it's troubling everyone since she started recording everything and capturing people in their vulnerable states. A friend from our group did tell her not to record their time together since they are uncomfortable, but she hasn't listened to them at all. Instead, she sent a message in our group saying, "Everything that we do is going to be recorded from now on," something like that. To make matters worse, she now tells everyone to behave a certain way, laugh a certain way, or even do certain things for her "CONTENT". Nothing is organic anymore. Since then, everyone has now started staying away from her because you never know, you could be in her next content piece. During all this time, my friend always supported her and asked us to understand her situation. I never raised this issue with him to respect that. But needless to say, we don't meet in groups often now.
Now the problem, he is a very close friend of mine, and we were in the same city recently, hence we met over dinner(Only he and I). He looked very sad and disturbed. After some time, he started opening up and told me that their relationship was going nowhere.
As per him, there isn't anything organic anymore. Everything that is happening in their relationship is for the followers. Every event, every situation is a setup and recorded for her content. He has to fake a lot of things and do a lot of things for her. She has changed alot as well. As soon as the camera is on, she will behave as if she is romanticizing her life and having the best life and post alot of fake things for social media. Once the camera is off, she is a different person. Always fighting, always comparing. One of the worst things is that she is now running out of ideas, and she is doing content or posting pictures that he is not comfortable with at all. Apparently, her reason is that it is the kind of content that gets more attention for her. There were also a couple of incidents of her "soft cheating" with her other influencer friends. Also, it appears she isn't interested in this relationship anymore, but hasn't said that to him directly.
He still wants to stick to her because she was his first, his friends and all his family know about her, and there are even talks about their marriage. I felt that this meeting me was more about getting validation from me. I think he wants to hear from someone else that he should step out of the relationship. He looks completely broken and disturbed. I couldn't suggest something to him because I felt I shouldn't push him for such an extreme step. I did tell him to sit down and talk to her. My mind says he should break up, but I don't want to tell him directly since I don't want to be in the firing line if things don't go well during the breakup.
What do you guys think?