Nature abhors a vacuum. Unfriend and other possibilities, better quality people, will come along. I think you should seriously consider that this person is riding you in some way, if they aren't really listening to you.

As for VPNs, I don't seriously believe any single point hop is securing you against very much. Maybe you can change your watcher from NSA to FSB at best. Tor is a joke, it has not improved in any meaningful way since 2007, just a bunch of mandatory protocol changes because they keep putting insecure garbage in the protocol.