Let’s talk about roasting, and men.

I do mean “men,” as opposed to “people,” or “humans,” and I don’t mean roasting like chestnuts on an open fire. I mean that (supposedly) good-natured teasing or jeering or raking-over-the-coals that’s supposed to be a tribute to the roasted one.

I’m specifying men because men roast men, period. Women don’t roast men, nor do they particularly roast each other. Nobody made these rules; they’re just how it is.

These thoughts are inspired by a letter Miss Manners answered on April 24, 2026. Miss Manners, of course, is the Queen of Etiquette. The letter-writer is a wife who’s indignant on behalf of her husband. Apparently he’s almost bald, and people “openly joke” about it, which both husband and wife find “incredibly rude.”

Why do people think this is okay? the wife wonders. She writes: “They would not do so to a woman with hair loss — it would be incredibly painful and hurtful. But no one seems to feel that it may be the same for men.”

Then she asks Miss Manners for a snappy one-liner for “when someone tries to humiliate him about his loss of hair.”

Miss Manners suggests he say: “‘What?!’ with a frantic pat to the head. ‘I swear it was all there yesterday!’”

Cute, right? It has a sense of humor. But it’s also her whole answer. Miss Manners stopped there, when she should have advised the LW to tell her husband to lighten up.

“Men do this to each other,” the wife should tell him. “It’s like roasting! It’s a thing!”

Because she didn’t say this, I am, and I anticipate certain reactions. I expect they’ll take three forms: either “well, men shouldn’t,” or “if men do, they should do the same to women,” or ”if men roast, women should, too.”

My answer to all three is the same: Shouldn’t men be able to have a culture of their own? That’s theirs, where others don’t butt in?

If there’s a second round of protests, I expect they’ll point out that this cultural practice is aggressive, and therefore bad.

That isn’t entirely wrong. It is aggressive—but that’s okay. AdviceObsessed sees roasting as a modern-day form of jousting, a spectator sport in which (heavily armored) knights on horseback charged at each other with their spears, each trying to knock the other guy off his horse.

It was a dominance game—a pecking-order game—and the premise was that the players were tough enough to take it. It was aggressive, but it presupposed strength.

Jousting, and roasting, too, are a sort of compliment men pay each other. The roaster trusts the roasted not to take offense, and the roasted takes it as a compliment.

By missing this aspect of the LW’s question, I’m afraid Miss Manners sets up her and her husband for further and quite unnecessary resentment. Many husbands are very suggestible about social matters, so this situation calls for leadership by the wife. (This additional generalization is, again, a risk, but in for a dime, in for a dollar.) Unfortunately, instead of leading him toward an easier, friendlier response, this wife reinforces her husband’s injured feelings, which does him no favors.

Before I leave this topic, there’s one last important point: Roasting is for grownups. Boys aren’t strong enough to take it, nor would boy roasters have the maturity to know when to stop. It may happen anyway, but it’s never to be encouraged for kids.

The column we’ll dissect today is from Slate’s Care and Feeding, written in this case by Arionne Nettles. Let’s get started.

The letter-writer’s husband has a sister who for years has been “very, very ill” with anorexia. The sister is now in inpatient care, and they’re planning a visit.

The couple has two daughters, ages four and six, who saw a lot of their aunt when she was healthy. Wife and husband disagree “strongly” about whether to bring the girls when they go.

The disagreement seems to center on whether to expose the kids to anorexia. The LW thinks they’re “old enough to know something’s very wrong but too young to understand it.” She does not want to bring them.

Her husband thinks “hiding makes eating disorders stronger,” and “it could be a risk for our kids if we don’t make everything clear from an early age.” He wants the girls to come along.

They’re arguing. What’s Arionne’s answer?

First, she gets points from AdviceObsessed for at least mentioning the needs of the “very, very ill” woman, who “might need more of this kind of help and support for years to come.”

But that’s all the attention the aunt gets from Arionne.

It’s about all the attention she gets from anyone else, either. The LW does say her sister-in-law is “brilliant,” and acknowledges the tragedy of her illness. But as she and her husband consider how to handle this visit, the only needs they factor in are their kids’.

I almost wrote “their bubble-wrapped kids,” but I don’t want to end up in a shouting match about snowflakes or free-range kids or What’s Happening In Our Colleges.

So let’s continue with Arionne’s advice.

She says the LW should let her daughters visit, but suggests they consider doing this by video. Also, she says body image can start to bother girls even as young as six, so the parents should consider this “an opportunity to have conversations” about “what it means to be healthy.”

AdviceObsessed suggests that a child old enough to worry about body image is old enough to understand the imperative to visit the sick. So is her four-year-old sister. This—not body image and healthy eating, which might scare their girls—is the conversation these parents must start right now.

After that, the parents should pack the kids in the car and hit the road, so they can bring love and cheer to their aunt’s bedside, in person. Because nothing says “I couldn’t be bothered” like a video call.

When they get there, the kids will look to their parents’ behavior to interpret what they see. If the parents don’t shrink from the aunt, but are cheerful and kind, the kids will be, too. Maybe they won’t apply what they see on the spot, but they will in many such situations to come—over many years to come—because kids miss nothing their parents do.

The girls will learn that everything isn’t always about them. They’ll also learn they have the power to help others, and that knowledge will bolster their self-images, more than a thousand lectures about body shaming and dietary health will ever do. Having them make cards or pictures for their aunt before the trip will reinforce the lesson that they have something to give, plus the aunt will cherish those.

Parents love their children, and want to protect them from life’s horrors; AdviceObsessed understands that. Unfortunately, though, we can’t stop horror from happening, so the best way to protect kids is to show them they can do something about it, by looking beyond themselves, and toward the needs of others.

But any such benefits for the kids will be byproducts, and not the reason for this exercise. The reason is the sister. This trip is for her.

There’s one more important point. The aunt is the husband’s sister, not the wife’s, and he really, really, wants his daughters there. He says it’s a matter of being open about anorexia, but is that the reason, actually? Or he just defending himself against his wife, when he says that?

Whatever—he wants them there. Even if there were no other factors to consider, this should decide the matter on its own. The LW should not refuse her husband’s wish to foster intimacy between his struggling sister and his kids.

AdviceObsessed has often suspected a lot of advice columnists aren’t really trying to solve people’s problems. What they’re trying to do is entertain their readers.

This is an excellent approach when the letters they’re answering are silly, and the columnist is a wit. It’s different, though, when someone sends in a serious problem.

The column we’ll tackle today is about a super-serious problem. It’s called “I Have a Gigantic Crush on My Co-worker,” and it was written for New York’s “Going Through It” by Allison P. Davis.

The letter-writer is in love with her co-worker. When she started the job, she writes, “it became immediately clear we had a ton in common and speak the same language.” Also right from the start there was “something more than friendship” between them, which she describes as “subtle — and sometimes not so subtle — flirtation.”

She calls this “an emotional affair” and an “all consuming” crush, and she calls it love. The trouble is, while both of them are flirting, he’s in a ten-year relationship he doesn’t plan to leave.

“I’ve fallen hard and have to see him every bloody day,” says the LW. “Help!”

Unfortunately, Allison doesn’t help. She advises the LW to “passionately [lean] into this crush, because having a crush is thrilling. It’s a reminder that you’re alive and full of feelings and desire.”

She writes: ”Develop a work crush, and all of a sudden your life has been injected with fantasies and fun delusions!”

I could let “fun delusions” speak for itself, but I’ll go on.

The LW feels intensely for this man, but clearly, Allison doesn’t see that. How she manages to miss clues like “love” and “all-consuming” is beyond me, but she does.

Let’s talk about crushes like the LW’s. Over the years, I’ve known lots of women with hopeless crushes, and I had a few myself, back in the day. Women mired in unreciprocated love talk to their friends, so I draw on a significant data-base when I say not one of these crushes—not my own, or anyone else’s—has ever been the slightest bit amusing.

The outcome for the LW, if she takes Allison’s dreadful advice, will be more pain. The LW is already in danger of becoming the other woman, not just in a flirtation or emotional affair, but in a real-life affair. If she and her fellow flirt find themselves alone, and they’re both drinking, the affair is almost inevitable.

Does Allison think affairs, too, are harmless fun? They’re not, and the one who’ll have the least fun in this affair is the LW herself. Her love object will have his ten-year relationship to go home to, whereas every moment she’s not with him, she’ll be alone.

To avoid this outcome, the LW needs to shut this crush down. Cheerful, pleasant, and firm must be her MO. When he starts talking about anything but the office, she needs to excuse herself. When the flirting starts—when he tosses that tempting ball in her direction—she needs to let it fall, and walk away.

Married people do this all the time, if they want to stay married. Office flirts don’t stop cropping up just because you’re wearing a ring.

Allison actually mentions the LW could ”do some sort of inner work to eradicate your crush feelings.” She rejects this, though, as “Boo, boring.” Really. I couldn’t possibly make this up.

AdviceObsessed strongly suggests the LW start pulling back now, before this all-consuming crush consumes any more of her life. She didn’t mention her long-term goals, but if they include marriage and a family, her feelings for this man could hold her down for years, undermining her chances of falling in love with someone plausible, because no one else will ever be quite as perfect as Mr. Wonderful at the office.

That leaves us with the mystery of Allison. The woman who wrote to her is unhappy, and asked for help, and Allison’s advice is not only nonsense, it’s destructive, too. Let’s hope the LW has a few other advisers. This one has dangerously let her down.

For more on serious problems that generate terrible advice, check out one of my most-read posts of all time: “We’re Having Another Girl. My Husband Just Asked Me to Do the Unthinkable”...

Advice columns about kids’ birthday parties are never just about the parties—can we agree on that?

So let’s jump right into “I Took a Totally Normal Approach to My Kid’s Birthday Party Guest List. One Mom Is Enraged,” by Slate’s Dear Prudence (Jenée Desmond-Harris).

The letter-writer’s neighbors were divorced three years ago, and the ex-husband got the house. The former couple’s nine-year-old daughter, “Cassandra,” is a close friend of the LW’s daughter, and when Cassandra is with her dad, the two girls see a lot of each other.

Casandra’s dad recently married a woman with two daughters of her own, and all three have moved into the house. The LW’s daughter dislikes these two new girls. So, apparently, does the LW. ”The oldest is bossy,” she writes, “and the youngest is a brat.”

Now the LW’s daughter is about to turn ten, and they’ve planned a small event with six friends. The invitation included long-time friend Cassandra, but not her new stepsisters.

Their mother is on a tear about that.

While the LW was unloading groceries from her car, the mother button-holed her with a “rant” about her daughters’ exclusion, and a threat that if they couldn’t come, neither could Cassandra.

The LW told her they’d “only paid for six kids,” and weren’t adding more. Then the stepmother stepped into her garage, and the LW told her to leave.

The LW asks Prudie how she should handle the party, as well as future visits with Cassandra.

First, Prudie addresses this business of excluding the stepsisters. She says there’s “tension” over this kind of thing in some “parenting spaces.” Some say unpleasant kids should be included, she reports, especially when their problems aren’t their fault. Yet some want to empower girls “to steer clear of those whose behavior is hurtful or unpleasant.” The reasoning here is that girls are “too often socialized to prioritize niceness over their own comfort.”

“I’m not sure where I come down on all of those issues,” Prudie writes.

Never fear, readers: AdviceObsessed knows exactly where she comes down.

On one side of this mess I see two children with (1) a problematic mother, (2) a new stepfather, (3) a new stepsister, and (4) a move to a new house.

On the other side I see a daughter who dislikes these two kids. I also see a mother who amplifies her daughter’s dislike (“bossy” and “a brat”). This mother responds to a request to include the new girls by saying she’s already spent enough money. Money!

I also see a rising trend in gender politics dressed up as an excuse for excluding troubled children.

By now you must have heard of “pleasers.” The word is all over the place. Prudie doesn’t use it, but it’s what she means. Pleasers—said to be usually women—like to please others. This is supposed to be bad, because, to quote Prudie, they’ve been “socialized to prioritize niceness over their own comfort.”

In my experience with the human race, I haven’t noticed that people who think too little of their own comfort constitute a huge problem. Moreover, I don’t think the LW’s in danger of raising such a person. The LW is, though, missing an opportunity to teach her daughter the Golden Rule, which is vastly wiser and more necessary than “remember to please yourself.”

The LW should tell the stepmother this, and she should bring her daughter with her when she does:

“We don’t like to exclude kids, and we know yours are new to the neighborhood. This party’s going to be small, just six, and the plans are all set. But why don’t we get everyone together for a movie night/ bowling/ a hike/…”

For whatever, in other words. It doesn’t matter what she proposes, as long as the kids will think it’s fun, and the relevant adults can be there to enforce good behavior.

Is it possible the stepmother will respond badly?

Yes, though we sincerely hope she doesn’t. But if she does take it the wrong way, it’s a teachable moment (to borrow again from the parenting spaces). The LW will have shown her daughter how hard some kids have it, and a bit, too, about doing unto others as you would have them do unto you.

My mother passed away more than ten years ago. While she lived, though, she had principles. It says a lot about mothers in general, and her in particular, that I find these principles hard to wriggle out of, even today.

One of them was no lying, ever. It was always wrong, and it was never necessary.

Some people—most people—assume a certain amount of social lying is unavoidable, and therefore permissible. “You look great,” “I love it,” “so nice to see you”—that kind of thing.

Not Mom. Her position was if you gave it a moment’s thought, you could always come up with something both polite and true.

I remembered all this recently when my brother-in-law, Adam Wildavsky, sent me a column by Miss Manners that raises this very question of the social lie. Adam often sends me interesting columns. Keep it up, BIL!

Anyway, the column he just sent is called “Friend makes me a vegan birthday cake every year. I hate it.” Here’s the situation:

Miss Manners published a letter from a woman who says she and her husband regularly join another couple for restaurant meals. The other couple is vegan. The LW and her husband aren’t.

Lately the other wife has “started a tradition of baking a vegan cake whenever one of us has a birthday, and sending a full cake home as an added bonus.”

The LW and her husband loathe these cakes. Yet every time, they eat their full (“oversized”) portion at the restaurant, and tell their friend it’s delicious. Then they take the cake home, and palm it off on a neighbor “who will eat any high-fat, high-calorie food that we hand to him.” When the LW eventually returns the plate to the vegans, she “[thanks]them again for their generosity.”

Now the LW’s birthday again looms, and she dreads the “semiannual oversize slab of this terrible vegan cake.” What should she do?

Miss Manners says she should do nothing. She has a good thing going with the neighbor who eventually eats the cakes. “Everyone wins,” she writes, “and no one gets hurt or insulted.”

(AdviceObsessed can’t help wondering about that neighbor: Is it possible he also loathes the cakes, and is lying to save the LW’s feelings? I can sort of see him thanking her, closing the door, and shuddering. Then he hunches silently over the sink and forks the cake down the drain, hunk by hunk, as the disposal roars…)

Moving on.

Adam, who identified this column, does not agree with Miss Manners.

The LW, he writes, should just say “she doesn’t care for the gift. The easy way is to explain that it’s not on her diet, which she takes seriously – totally truthful.”

I’m not as sanguine as Adam about the consequences of opening a conversation about diet with a vegan. But that specific excuse was just a suggestion, and it wasn’t Adam’s main point. His point was that if the LW keeps going the way she is, she “risks poisoning the relationship by lying, and worse, she will have to consider herself a prevaricator rather than an honest person…Honesty is the best policy!”

AdviceObsessed would like to split the difference between Miss Manners and Adam Wildavsky.

I do think the LW should should continue to accept the cakes, but I also think she should find a truthful way of expressing her appreciation. My mother’s ghost hovers over me; what can I say. Here are a few possibilities:

“Oh, you never forget; you’re so faithful. Thanks very much.”

“What a generous friend you are!”

“Thank you, you’re the best!”

Or just “Oooh! Thanks!”

In other words, if the LW can’t truthfully praise the gift, she can certainly praise the giver. And this gets me to the most important point: What are these regular foursomes actually for? Are they for culinary exploration? A search for a new taste sensation? Or are they for friendship?

If the dinners are for friendship’s sake, the LW should definitely keep thanking her friends for the cakes. If it’s really all about the food, though, she and her husband should find new companions, who are after the same thing. They should be ready to learn, though, that the new friends don’t care about them quite as much as the vegan baker did.

What are advice columnists, anyway? Are they just therapists with bigger audiences? Or do they have a different job?

This question troubled me, Rachel Flick Wildavsky, long before I disappeared into a phone booth and emerged as AdviceObsessed. Ever since, I’ve been looking for just the right column on which to crack the matter open. Today’s the day, and the columnist I have to thank is Carolyn Hax.

Carolyn just published a letter from a 29-year-old woman who’s been with her husband for nine years, and married to him for two.

All was well between them til the letter-writer accidentally learned her husband had downloaded ”at least six different dating/hookup apps.” He’d had the first of these apps since 2022, before the couple married.

She confronted him. He said he got them because he was bored or lonely. He said he hasn’t done anything with them—he hasn’t so much as started a conversation.

The LW also found he had the Signal app, which enables private conversations. He said Signal, too, was just because he was “bored and curious.”

She wants to believe him, but has “serious doubts.” She asks: “Do you think anyone has ever downloaded a bunch of hookup apps just because they were bored and curious?”

The answer is no, no one’s ever done that, he’s cheating on her. But that’s not what Carolyn said.

To be fair, Carolyn hints broadly at the right answer. She writes, for instance, that it’s “humanly possible” the LW’s husband isn’t lying. “Humanly possible” is damning the the guy with a faint excuse (to coin a phrase). She also says her readers “will be certain your husband is lying and hooking up.”

But because no one actually knows, Carolyn suggests the LW try taking her husband’s excuses “at absolute face value.” This seems to be a sort of mental exercise, and she walks us through its various steps. It gets pretty twisty, though, as well as long, and I confess it’s hard to follow.

AdviceObsessed tries to avoid criticizing any columnist’s writing per se, but Carolyn chronically over-writes, and in this case it’s a problem. Here, her many words function like squid ink, misdirecting and baffling the LW’s straightforward pursuit of the truth: Is her husband lying?

I think I get Carolyn’s reason for equivocating. “Yes” might be the simple answer, but like a therapist, she doesn’t want to overstep. She writes that “it’s not up to me how you respond to your husband or anything else.”

And maybe that’s the right position for therapists, but Carolyn isn’t a therapist, is she? She’s an advice columnist, and the columnist’s job is to answer the question.

In this case, Carolyn should have told the LW, as simply as possible, that her husband’s a liar. Then she should have advised the LW to speak to a lawyer immediately, in case this liar has been hiding assets, as well as illicit relationships.

Then, without further ado, the LW needs to begin the painful process of extricating herself from her very bad marriage, so she can build a new life with someone more worthy.

By not clearly saying all this, Carolyn risks real harm to the letter-writer. It’s all too easy for people women to find excuses for people men who deceive or otherwise mistreat them. They’re understandably afraid of a change that will plunge them, however temporarily, into loneliness.

You probably know women who’ve done that. Maybe, woman or man, you’ve done it yourself. By assigning homework to the LW, and evading her direct question, Carolyn handed her an excuse for clinging to this sad and already too-long relationship, instead of dealing it the sharp, cold ending it deserves.

“Am I Wrong to Not Want Kids?” is the title of the advice column we’ll discuss today.

And what an excellent title it is, especially now, with birth rates cratering around the world.

The columnist, too—Abigail Shrier, of The Free Press—is interesting, in an iconoclastic way. So AdviceObsessed looked forward to a treat, when she saw this column.

She was disappointed.

Not entirely! Abigail’s actual advice is good. It’s the rest of what she wrote that’s the problem. Let’s start.

Abigail got a letter from a 29-year-old woman who’s decided not to have kids.

The letter-writer never wanted them, not ever. She’s always wanted to marry, and she and her partner plan to do that, “soon.” But he doesn’t want kids, either, and she thinks they’ll “have a fulfilling life pursuing [their] hobbies and careers.”

So why did she write to Abigail? Because she worries her feelings may someday change. She asks: “Am I making a huge mistake?”

Abigail says the LW is confused about kids because she’s in a partnership instead of a marriage. Abigail doesn’t like partnerships (“the relationship equivalent of a motel”). She mistrusts that plan to marry “soon,” and is unsurprised the LW doesn’t “feel a deep desire to start a family” with someone so “ambiguously committed.”

She advises the LW to marry ASAP, either her current partner, or someone she truly loves, who loves her back. After that, ”the next step”—children—”may finally feel right.”

If Abigail had limited herself to that, she would at least have done no harm, to the LW or anyone else. As I said, it’s good advice. Unfortunately, though, before she signed off she aired a lot of questionable claims.

Questionable and arrogant. She wrote:

“In any high school class there is a small subset of girls who always knew they wanted to be mothers. You know the sort: They immediately notice any small child in the vicinity, and engage him breathlessly, often at eye level. They often get married principally to have children—almost any nice guy will do. Unsurprisingly, many of these women become teachers.”

What an insult to women who always liked kids. What an insult to their husbands and their marriages. And to teachers, too. Abigail’s contempt is palpable.

Also, who says those girls who are drawn to kids are only a “small subset”? Abigail does. Then she describes “a vastly larger category,” and surprise! It’s the one that includes herself. This category consists of:

“…[girls] who assumed we’d have a family one day, but mostly, we wanted to fall in love and get married. It was only after we did those things that any vague sense that we wanted kids turned acute. Only after we had a husband we loved did we want to give him children, a family, a legacy.”

This category doesn’t include AdviceObsessed, so it falls to me to put in a word for us women whose desire for children goes beyond a gift opportunity for our husbands. And if Abigail can claim a majority for her point of view, I’ll claim a majority for mine, what the hell.

I think most women want kids because we have love to give.

We love our husbands; like Abigail, I believe that’s the right place to start. But kids happen when wives and husbands both want to share their love with someone they love together.

This is not a wife’s gift to her husband, but very much a couple’s gift to each other. At the heart of that gift is the opportunity for more giving, this time to a child.

For most couples, this beautiful generosity is part of the plan even before they marry, and they choose their spouses accordingly and carefully (no, “any nice guy” won’t do, sheesh). One of the main reasons they marry is they both understand their “careers and hobbies,” valuable though they are, just won’t cut it as a reason to live.

And here we get to a deeper layer.

You read the existentialists in college, didn’t you? To remind you, here’s what they’re about: Each of us gets to live for a few brief years, then we all die. Why, then, do we bother?

For many of us, the answer is we’re each one link in the long human chain, and if we don’t raise people to leave behind us, we’re where that chain ends. When we choose to bring up children, we know the story of which we’ve been a part will continue after we’re gone.

The existentialists gave up on the great, ongoing human experiment. Those of us who marry and raise kids, don’t. This commitment is so fundamental that many religions regard parenthood as a holy obligation, but you definitely don’t have to be religious to feel its power.

Abigail does try to answer “why have kids?” with something more than just pleasing husbands. She mentions the delight of watching babies get licked by puppies, for instance, or tasting ice cream, and she won’t get any argument from me about any of that. The prospect of that kind of joy is a big part of why most parents said yes to life. Most new parents are eager for intimacy with new and adorable people.

But some of us were always eager, while Abigail acknowledges she “found other people’s kids gross and irritating” until she had her own.

So letter-writer, go ahead and take Abigail’s advice. AdviceObsessed shares her mistrust of your partnership, with its vague plans and timelines. And I can’t help hoping children will follow true love, when you find it, though I know they may not.

But whether or not they do, I also hope your long-term vision sees beyond hobbies and careers, toward a more substantial basis for real and meaningful happiness.

AdviceObsessed is back!

Spring break was super fun. But was it worth abandoning advice-seekers to face the official advice columnists on their own? You’ll be the judge.

Actually, you won’t, because the column we’re considering today was published—by Lori Gottlieb, The Atlantic’s “Dear Therapist”—in 2019. So presumably, the guy who wrote the letter has long ago sunk or swum on what she recommended. Nonetheless, here’s my take on “My Girlfriend Had an Affair With My Co-worker.”

The letter-writer reported that five months earlier, his girlfriend of many years had cheated. He experienced “acute anger” over this.

But that was then. By the time he wrote this letter, he and his girlfriend had talked. He’d come to understand that before the affair, their relationship had “broken down,” and he had acknowledged his role in that. His girlfriend sincerely regrets what she did. He still loves her. While “the process of repair is ongoing,” they’re closer than they’ve been in a long while, and in short, they’re staying together.

The problem is that the man she cheated with is his coworker. He and this co-worker have never discussed what happened, and the LW emphatically doesn’t want to, but just seeing the guy makes the LW see red. “My breathing increases; my heart races,” he writes. He fights a “strong urge to punch and break things.”

This can kill his mood for the whole day, and the passage of time isn’t helping. What can he do?

Lori assures the LW his feelings are normal. Then she tells him to talk to the guy.

This is the one thing the LW says he doesn’t want to do.

And what does Lori think the LW should say? He should start by saying it’s been been “really awkward” for them to see each other. Then he should tell the co-worker he “hurt [me] deeply.” Then he should “stop talking and let his co-worker fill in that space however he chooses.”

“Awkward”? “Hurt me”? When the LW is livid?

The LW is feeling rage, and Lori wants him to express pain.

Yes, pain often drives rage. But just because the one drives the other, doesn’t mean rage and pain are the same thing.

Rage stimulates. Recall that the LW only needs to see this guy to experience rapid breathing and a racing heart.

AdviceObsessed suspects there’s also shame in that rage. Someone violated his intimacy with the woman he loves. He may feel he was played for a fool. He may feel humiliated. He shouldn’t, but he might anyway.

Why, then, would the LW tell the guy who did this how much it hurt?

By the way, Lori doesn’t even entertain the possibility the co-worker might not care. He may have felt no awkwardness at all. Suppose, for instance, if told he hurt the LW, he shrugged and said that annoying thing about the circus and the monkeys. Even if the LW weren’t already mad, which he is, he would be then.

But the LW wanted to know what to do, and since I’m nixing Lori’s answer, I’ll offer my own.

The LW certainly can’t punch anybody, or throw things. That would be assault or (I guess) vandalism. This is in the social contract.

Nor can the LW tell the coworker how angry he is. That would be heard as a threat, and would go straight to HR. In fact, I see no way for the LW to confront this man that wouldn’t be either illegal, or beneath his dignity.

What this means is he must get over it. That’s all that’s left to him, unfortunately. Then, if he can, he and his girlfriend should marry, to close a bad chapter and formalize their commitment.

It’s true that nothing says “we’re better than ever” like a wedding ring. But the wedding can’t be a stunt. It should happen only if the LW can really, truly get over the affair. Because if he can’t, that ongoing “process of repair” with his girlfriend maybe isn’t as far along as he thinks.

If you want to stay happy with the one you love, readers, avoid infidelity. It’s relationship poison, and it isn’t easily flushed from the system.

For the sake of all her readers, Lori should have mentioned that. But she didn’t.

Let’s jump right into the advice column we’ll consider today. It’s called "I’m Afraid My Boyfriend’s Sexuality Will End Our Relationship,” and it’s by Lori Gottlieb, The Atlantic’s “Dear Therapist.”

The letter Lori answers is from a woman who’s been with her boyfriend for a year. The boyfriend’s bisexual. The letter-writer’s always known that, because he said so in the dating app where they met.

The LW says all this, right up front. So when she tells us she can’t seem to relax, in this relationship of one year, we’re supposed to know it’s not because he’s bi. It’s because she keeps worrying he’s really gay.

She worries her boyfriend is “using me as a stepping stone” on the way to coming out. He sometimes talks about his body and mind being “in conflict.” And “he sometimes acts effeminate and dresses extremely flamboyantly.” This upsets her.

She also worries she functions for him as a heterosexual cover story, so he can “reap the social benefits” of the straight life: “having kids, generally being accepted in society, etc.” He “comes from an extremely religious family in the South” who might not accept a gay son, so maybe he just keeps her around to “appease” them.

Then, finally, he’s never been with a man. That means he’d be giving that up to be with her, and that leaves her uneasy. She wants a marriage and children, and she doesn’t want her husband to discover, years down the road, that actually he’s gay.

Given all this, should she stay or should she go?

Lori’s answer mostly consists of granular advice about the way the LW and her boyfriend should talk this through, which is basically the way therapists talk to clients. Lori includes an actual script (“It sounds like you’re feeling scared/confused/conflicted,” or “It sounds like my questions about your sexuality are upsetting to you. Can you tell me why?”).

Pretty sure I’d want to throw something at my husband if he ever talked to me that way.

AdviceObsessed would like to take this answer in a completely different direction.

She thinks this relationship was misbegotten to begin with, and can’t be fixed. No conversation, no matter how well scripted or conducted, can possibly relieve the LW’s anxiety.

What’s more, the fault is entirely the LW’s. She knew he was bi, before the first date. Her mistake was telling herself that was okay, when that wasn’t how she felt.

Here’s what Lori should have told the LW: Gay is great and straight is great, and it’s perfectly reasonable for people in either of those camps to decline relationships with people in the other.

That’s not what bi does, though. “Bi” means the person’s interested in both, and that means there are two possible outcomes to any relationship. One is that one or both parties end up with multiple partners, which the LW doesn’t want. The other is the bi partner renounces either one sex or the other.

But that kind of renunciation is unstable, and unlikely to be permanent. The LW suspects this, and she’s right. She can’t bear the thought of being with him, while wondering if he’d really prefer someone else, whom she can’t possibly be.

“Gay” is part of “bi.” So why did the LW tell herself bi was ok, if gay was not?

She found this guy on an app. His sexual orientation was “clearly stated in his profile.” Surely there were many other men on this app who weren’t bi, yet she chose this one. It was a self-destructive choice, for a woman who wants a marriage and kids.

Then, having chosen, she sank a year into the relationship, while her anxiety festered and her eggs aged.

And Lori? Honestly, I’m frustrated here, because she’s a therapist! Why didn’t she address the LW’s strange decision?

One concluding note: Have you noticed that the “extremely religious family in the South” just about always makes an appearance, in letters about sex? I really should go through my archive and count the times it’s turned up.

By now, that family is almost like a stock character. And in this case, I get that it’s much easier for the LW to point the finger at them than to consider her own role in the things that happen to her. A qualified therapist could probably help her with that, but that therapist wouldn’t be Lori Gottlieb.

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If you’ve ever been responsible for an aging relative, you know how hard it is to find good carers, for when you just can’t be there yourself. It’s a tough job to do well!

Where I live, though, many in this profession are from Ghana, and that’s lucky for us, because many Ghanaian carers are strikingly dedicated and compassionate.

The question is: How come?

I’ll never forget what a friend once told me. Impressed by the man then helping her loved one, she said she asked him: What was Ghana’s secret?

The carer’s immediate answer? “The strap.”

I thought of this when I read “My Fiancé Believes Spanking Is Good Parenting,” by The Atlantic’s Dear Therapist, written by Lori Gottlieb. Let’s recap.

The woman who wrote to The Therapist is engaged to marry her beloved boyfriend of four years. Soon after they became engaged, he told her he was spanked as a child. He grew up, she reports, “in a very traditional southern household,” and she attributes the spanking to that culture.

Her problem is, he thinks it “made him a better person,” and plans to spank his own future children.

But the letter-writer’s from progressive Colorado, and for her, “this is a deal breaker.” She told him so, and he said that as some aspects of his worldview had changed in recent years, maybe this would, too.

But he said it “vaguely.” So she wonders: Now what?

The Therapist is encouraged by the fiancé’s apparent openness to change, but thinks the matter shouldn’t be left to time or chance. She therefore suggests the couple “dive deeper into this difference together,” articulating why each feels the way they do. She also suggests they take a parenting class, so the fiancé can learn how bad spanking is from an expert, instead of from the LW.

“Healthy parenting,” The Therapist writes, “is about influence, not power...Children don’t learn from being hit and left crying.” She adds that spanking is illegal in about 50 countries, and that the American Academy of Pediatrics opposes it. Finally, The Therapist enumerates the “harmful effects on child development” the Academy traces to spanking.

So as we see, The Therapist moves beyond advising this couple on how to resolve a difference, to taking a position on their specific disagreement.

AdviceObsessed can’t exactly do the same. The topic is too complicated! Certainly, many parents have raised fine children without spanking them. But there’s also that surprising explanation for why so many Ghanaian adults are so outstandingly kind. What can we make of this?

I think we start here: For some tasks, there’s more than one way to go, and childrearing is one of those tasks.

If motherhood taught me anything, it taught me that. Like most parents, I traveled through the childrearing years in a community, whose members talked to each other all the time. In observing each other, we all saw a range of parental practices, on corporal punishment among many other things.

At the time, I had my doubts about some of the things I saw others do. How wrong I was. I’m glad to say all those kids are grown now, and really: Everyone is okay.

It shouldn’t surprise any of us to learn there’s more than one way to bring up children. After all, we know cultures vary. We talk about cultural sensitivity all the time! So why is it a shock that Americans and Ghanaians (to stick with that example) both produce functional and even thriving adults, with very different methods? As do Southerners and Coloradans.

Nor are existing cultures the only ones that vary. The range gets even wider if we loop in the past. Our forebears had a different culture, too, and raised children differently from the way we do. Most of them probably spanked, in fact, and I’m not convinced the resulting adults were any more brutal or neurotic than we are today.

What does this say about The Therapist? AdviceObsessed thinks she might have limited herself to practical advice about resolving differences, rather than picking the cultural model the LW and her fiancé ought to follow.

Please don’t interpret this as spanking advocacy. Spanking is very unpopular in my circle! I could be run out of town on a rail, and anyway, that’s not what I’m saying. The anti-spankers make a good case, too.

All I’m saying is this: The Southern culture the LW deplores nurtured the man she loves, whom she describes as “incredibly thoughtful and giving.” A culturally sensitive therapist might have given this more consideration than, in her column, it got.

For a time, in my twenties, I was a reporter for a big-city paper, assigned to cover the U.S. Congress, the White House, and other news-making institutions. It was a great job and I was glad to have it, and the buzzy social life that went with it. But I was also single and lonely, and dating in DC could be cold.

I remember a day when I glided into the Capitol building on my press pass, alongside a long line of tourists who waited to enter. My gaze landed on a middle-aged couple of unremarkable appearance.

They were bantering easily with each other, while a couple of kids scuffled beside them. His arms were wrapped around her, and she leaned on him.

They were comfortable, and close.

As I swept past them, I was stabbed by frustration. How do they have this, I wondered? What’s so special about her? What’s special about him?

This incident came back to me when I read the Valentine’s Day post in Tough Love, Abigail Shrier’s new advice column in The Free Press.

The letter Shrier answered was from a 30-year-old woman who just ended an unsatisfactory four-year relationship. Now the letter-writer is “happily single,” and rhapsodizes over the life: “I have a successful career, make good money, live in a desirable neighborhood with my cute and companionable dog, and have best friends who are also single,” she writes. “I travel, enjoy sporting events, go to exercise classes, drink cosmos, run marathons, and spend lots of time out in the city with friends.”

And yet…and yet…

The letter-writer also finds herself dreaming of “a partnership and being a parent.” Dating is awful, and she now thinks she never loved the boyfriend who consumed the past four years of her life. But she thinks about love, and worries she “will never feel that transcendent feeling that so many people talk about.” Is there hope, she asks?

Shrier’s answer is long, but the gist of it is that instead of cherishing her convenient and independent life, the LW should open her heart to the inconvenience and dependence of loving and marrying a specific man.

To find this marriageable man, she says the LW should get off the apps, and start “accepting setups and meeting young men out in the world.”

So far, so good. But while her answer is interesting, nowhere does Shrier get to the meat of the matter, which is that marriage can save the LW from what could otherwise become a trivial life.

Marriage has this power because it’s a serious commitment—the most serious commitment most of us will ever make.

To marry is to pull your oar for the human family, by committing to love one person, unselfishly, through thick and thin, as he will commit to you. The couple enlarges this commitment when they become a family, and raise children.

Of course, marriage-and-a-family isn’t the only serious way of life. Some people commit themselves to art, for instance, or good works, or professions that provide urgent services to others. Untold millions make a daily commitment to religious teachings and practices that lift them out of themselves, and connect them to other people and transcendent ideals.

But most of those people are called to those paths early in life. Never say never, but given that the LW is 30, and so far her vision of the good life is to “eat exactly what I want” and “play Joni Mitchell at full volume,” she’s probably not one of them.

I mean no insult! The truth is, most of us aren’t. The beautiful thing about family is it offers a deeply meaningful life to ordinary people.

Even the least heroic among us can, for our families, achieve feats of care, empathy, and generosity we could not hope to approach any other way.

It helps that those for whom we act are flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone. That’s literally true, for biological children, but it’s true, too, for spouses and adopted children, because that’s the promise we made them when we made them our families.

Ever wander through a cemetery? Please look for a headstone that reads: “Here lies Emily. She made SVP.”

No luck? Try: “She liked a night out on the town.”

But you won’t be able to count the stones that read “Devoted Wife,” or “Loving Mother.” You may also find tributes to siblings, aunts, and uncles who—not having married or become parents—made themselves indispensable to close family members for whom they live on in memory.

This is not to get funereal about marriage. It’s a huge a source of joy, too, and the kind of easy-going fun only a family can share, in the home where each is essential, and each is relaxed as people can only be when they know they truly belong. No other intimacy can touch family life.

As for Shrier’s letter-writer? AdviceObsessed is more optimistic than not. Today more people than ever are choosing not to marry, and growing numbers of them choose the “cute and companionable dog” over more the far more complicated children.

But this LW suspects there’s something more, and she wants it, too. She wants it enough to have written this letter. Good for her. With such a purpose, her future looks bright.

The advice column we’re considering today is by Miss Manners, and it’s a tale briefly told.

The letter-writer attended a music festival, dressed (if that’s the word) in “pasties instead of a top.”

Fun, fun, fun! Then she ran into a group of co-workers, who laughed at her.

She was embarrassed, of course. So what, she asks Miss Manners, should she do when she sees these people at the office? Say something? Pretend “it never happened?” Or “just laugh it off?”

“Let them have their laughs,” Miss Manners replies. This is wise advice, as the LW can’t exactly prevent that.

Miss Manners then suggests the LW find and remove any compromising photos of herself that may be lurking on the internet.

Removing compromising photos from the internet will never be a bad idea. And having recommended it, Miss Manners has gone as far as she needs to go, since, famously, her brief is “manners, not morals.”

In this case, though, her answer doesn’t quite cover the problem, so AdviceObsessed will ask the followup question: How can the letter-writer prevent compromising photos from landing on the internet to begin with? In public places, like a music festival, anyone can snap and post a picture any time.

The best way to prevent compromising photos from circulating is to not give photographers anything to photograph. This is a sound policy for all of us: If we’d be embarrassed to have others find out what we’re doing, we shouldn’t do it.

But under what conditions?

We definitely shouldn’t invite embarrassment in public. I expect near-universal agreement on that. The question gets more interesting, though, when we’re not in public. When no one’s looking, is it okay to do something we’d be embarrassed to have others discover?

AdviceObsessed’s answer is no.

If this seems harsh, please back up a step and think, for a moment, about pain. We all know it helps keep our bodies safe. The burnt dog shuns the fire.

Embarrassment—or its more serious cousin, shame—helps keep our souls safe. If you’re uncomfortable with “soul,” maybe think about this in the more popular language of health. Most socially unacceptable behavior is unacceptable not only because it displeases others, but also because it’s not good for us.

I don’t mean private, un-coerced behavior should be policed. I hope I didn’t even need to say that. I do mean, though, it’s useful for each of us to remember what others would think if they knew. General opprobrium isn’t always bigotry (though it can be). Sometimes it’s the wisdom of crowds.

“Tell me, why is it that people who want help do better without it - at least, no worse... They take all the help they can get, and are just the same as they always have been.”

That’s from Norman MacLean’s gorgeous novella, A River Runs Through It.* I’m quoting from it here because MacLean’s words about helping are, sad to say, very often true.

Let’s keep that in mind as we dig into today’s advice column. It’s by Slate’s Dear Prudence, and it’s called “Help! I Want to Escape a Chaotic Friendship.”

A few years ago, the letter-writer, in crisis, was admitted to the psych ward of her local hospital. During her stay she met “Sara,” who was having her own crisis. Sara was “dynamic, bright, creative, funny and caring to a fault,” and the two became friends.

Both were eventually discharged, and they’re still friends.

But life on the outside has gone better for the letter-writer than for Sara. The LW has “stability and a path forward.” Sara, on the other hand, “is often sullen, easily offended, and quick to anger.” She’s in “nearly constant conflict with someone.” Her family relations, employment, and even housing are regularly in jeopardy.

The LW is running out of patience. What’s more, the strain of this friendship is taxing her ability to preserve her own “strength and stability.”

She’s tried dialing the relationship down, to avoid having to end it, but Sara notices and resists this. The LW wants to walk away, but asks: “What kind of friend would I be if I abandoned Sara—as so many others have?”

Prudie’s answer? “Sara’s mean to you and treats you badly. That’s a free pass to walk away.” She does clear the LW to “do it as kindly as possible,” and to “wish [Sara] the best from afar.” But she also says: “You never have to keep a jerk in your life, even if you sincerely understand the reasons behind their jerkiness.”

That’s the right advice. But there are two things wrong with its delivery: Prudie’s tone, and her reasoning.

Let’s start with tone. We all know discussing sensitive matters makes some people uncomfortable. AdviceObsessed has noticed that sometimes the uncomfortable try to compensate with rough language. It’s as if they want to crash through their discomfort, by battering down awkwardness and getting to straight talk.

I sympathize, but only to a point. And “you never have to keep a jerk in your life” is, under the LW’s circumstances, beyond that point.

As to Prudie’s reasoning, it seems to be based on the LW’s rights. She doesn’t have to maintain ties with Sara; she may walk if she wants to.

And so she may. But the LW feels awful about giving up on this ill and unhappy friend, and giving her permission to do so is unlikely to make her feel better.

Instead of telling her she can stop trying whenever she wants, Prudie should have told the LW there’s no point in trying, because she’ll never succeed.

Some people can’t be helped. You can give them good advice. You can love them, even, but their minds or hearts cannot assimilate those gifts.

Whether they can’t hear the truth, or won’t hear the truth, is what you really want to know, but that question is often unanswerable. You’re left with only this: They don’t hear the truth. And that’s that.

In situations like this, the sad solution for a frustrated friend is to step back and live her own life.

This LW is a good woman. She was right to give helping a try, and we sense she’ll always be open to evidence Sara has truly changed. But if she’s as wise as she is good, at this point, she won’t hold her breath.

*Highly recommended reading.

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At some point, somehow, it got established that when a romance stalls over the marriage question, it’s bad form to issue an ultimatum. It’s considered manipulative.

All advice columnists seem to accept this. But AdviceObsessed has never understood it, and the letter we’ll discuss today is an excellent illustration why (the letter was sent to Slate’s Dear Prudence and published on January 7).

The letter-writer and her boyfriend are both 25, and so far they’ve logged eight years together. Her first paragraph lavishes the usual praise on him and their relationship.

Sorry about the cynicism. But it’s the old story, friends: She wants to marry him, and has for “a couple of years now.” He says he wants to marry her, but he won’t get engaged. At some point they agreed not to marry til they’re “closer to 30,” but for the letter-writer, 30 is starting to feel like too long to wait.

Now he wants them to buy a house together, and she’s balking. She asks Prudie: “How is he OK with committing to buying a house but not even giving me a ring?”

A friend suggested she issue an ultimatum, but she doesn’t want to pressure her boyfriend. She doesn’t want “a ‘shut up’ ring,” but she does want “a marriage and kids,” and she feels the clock ticking, so she’s all torn up.

And Prudie? I’m sorry to say Prudie (Jenée Desmond-Harris, in this case) begins by jerking this LW around. How? She says wanting to buy a house together “signals a significant commitment.” Then she adds: “I think the man wants to be with you forever!”

This is just malpractice. Let’s break it down.

If you’ve ever known a woman in the LW’s position, and we’ve all known many, you know she’s afraid to insist on an answer to her enormous question, for fear she won’t like what she hears. She thinks she’d rather stay happy and not know, than learn the awful truth.

But this particular woman is ready to move past this. “Sometimes,” she writes, “I feel like his lack of commitment is a hint” that he’s not as sure as she is.

So she understands she’s already unhappy, right now, and she’s thinking seriously about forcing this crisis and rescuing herself.

Progress! But as Prudie must have known, it’s really hard, and the LW will clutch at any straw to avoid this frightening step.

And Prudie handed her a straw.

After giving the LW false hope, Prudie does acknowledge the misery of living in limbo, and takes up the question of the ultimatum. Here her advice shifts from the harmful to the bewildering. “I agree that you shouldn’t give him an ultimatum,” she writes. “But maybe you should give yourself one—and tell [your boyfriend] about where you stand.”

This is a distinction without a difference, since she’s giving her boyfriend the same information either way. But after telling the LW to issue the ultimatum to herself only, Prudie’s careful to write: “This isn’t me advocating for playing games or manipulating others.”

So why not counsel the woman to tell her boyfriend the truth, which is if he’s not ready to marry her, she’s done?

And why not call it an ultimatum, since it is one?

What it isn’t is manipulation. Manipulation is sly and underhanded. An ultimatum is about at straightforward as it gets. It’s communication of the clearest sort. When truthfully used, it’s a simple statement of fact: I’m no longer happy with the way we are, so either we get engaged, or I’m breaking up with you.

The big question is: Why can’t a woman in this position assert such a reasonable need? Did you notice what this LW said, about not wanting a "a ‘shut-up ring’”? What an insulting expression, and she used it against herself.

How much better it would be for her to rise on her own two feet, and with long, strong strides, walk away from a man who’s already had eight years to make up his mind.

This post is about a letter to Miss Manners, which she answered the wrong way. But before I get into that, let’s run a little test.

Let’s say 25 years ago, a couple you were close to was about to get married. But one of their parents died, they put the wedding on hold, and what with one thing or another, they never got back to it. You’re still close to them, and you long ago concluded they just weren’t going to marry.

Then you get an announcement in the mail. Surprise! They just did get married. It was a small affair, the announcement explained, because the venue imposed “guest-list restrictions.” Wedding pics were enclosed.

So here’s the test: How would that announcement sound to you? Maybe something like:

“We got married! Here are pictures of what you missed. As you can see from the photos, we included some people, but not you. That’s because we freely and knowingly chose a venue that capped the number we could invite. So not inviting you wasn’t our fault.”

Before you say “AdviceObsessed is so cynical! No one would react that way to a wedding announcement,” here’s how the actual non-guests of this actual couple responded.

Briefly: No one who got the announcement congratulated them—not one person. “I hear instead,” the bride wrote, “‘I thought we were closer,’ and ‘you should have told us ahead of time’.” Though she neither mentioned nor expected gifts, she also heard “‘I guess you don’t need anything from us.’“

She had hoped to surprise and please their friends and family, she wrote, plaintively. Instead she got “a guilt trip.”

Now let’s turn to Miss Manners, who’s usually so good on etiquette-rich occasions like weddings. What did she think of all this?

Miss Manners was “appalled”—by the letter-writer’s friends!

AdviceObsessed is appalled by the letter-writer, and by Miss Manners, too. What got into her?

By way of explanation, Miss Manners complains—in a vaguely generational way—about people who don’t bother to respond unless there’s something in it for them, like a fun party. But this doesn’t make sense, because people did respond to the LW’s announcement. They just didn’t respond the way the LW wanted.

Miss Manners might have mentioned, instead, that it’s rude to share pictures of fun events with people you didn’t invite. That’s a generational thing, too (and kids: it has to stop). But she said nothing about that.

Finally, why is she so negative about weddings and guests? Why assume people responded churlishly to this news because they “equate weddings with commercial entertainment,” and they weren’t offered any?

AdviceObsessed believes most people do want to share the joy of a loved-one’s wedding. Many want to buy a gift, too. Usually everyone’s happy for the bride and groom. The LW’s guests acted insulted because they were insulted, not because there was nothing in it for them.

So what should this couple have done, if they didn’t want a big wedding?

An announcement did make sense. The people they didn’t invite might have been even more offended to learn about this marriage on the streets, so to speak. But it should have been a simple announcement, merely indicating the deed was done, and no gifts, please. They should have said nothing about how they were married, or why that was so.

A single photo of the two of them would have been okay, but only if no one besides the bride, the groom, and their immediate families were in it, and the venue and setup were nowhere in sight. In such a photo there must, in other words, be no hint that 50 favored people were digging into a catered meal off camera.

But I mentioned etiquette. Is that what etiquette would have indicated? I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter. No rule of etiquette is more important than the Golden Rule, which asks us to treat others the way we’d want them to treat us.

Abiding by that rule calls for a sympathetic imagination, the kind that would consider, for instance, how the couple’s self-exculpating note might strike its readers. A little of that imagination would have gone a long way here.

This post is based on Miss Manners’ column: “We Announced We Got Married…”, published January 13.

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The column we’re considering today is strange, fellow advice-lovers. Either that, or I’m reading too much into it, but you’ll be the judge.

It’s from Going Through It, by Emily Gould of New York. It was published on May 28 under the headline: “‘Help! My Dad Thinks My Son Is Calling Him ‘Dada.’’

The letter is from a woman whose recently-retired father just moved to be near her, her husband, and their two-year-old son. It’s been “fantastic,” she writes, because her father “shares a sweet and truly wonderful bond with his grandson.”

He’s about to move to his own place, but so far he’s living with them. He cooks and cleans. He plays with their son “for hours on end,” giving her and her husband precious time together. It’s an “amazing deal,” and everyone’s happier since he arrived.

Except for this: When her son says “Dada,” her father sometimes answers, even though he’s only the grandpa.

The LW sort of knows this shouldn’t be a big deal. Her husband—to whom it ought to matter most, if it matters at all—“doesn’t love it, but he’s more relaxed about it.” Some early dementia may be a factor. Her father sometimes mixes up other names, calling “my son by my sister’s name, my name, even my husband’s name.” All recognize these as “mostly” honest mistakes.

But, according to the LW, they may not all be honest. She writes, darkly, that some of her father’s slips feel “less like a misunderstanding.” Then she describes a harmless incident when he mistook her son’s repetition of “dat,” which meant “that,” for “dad,” and playfully responded to it, in a call-and-response way.

She says: “There seems to be less of an excuse there.” She worries this will confuse her son. And she appealed to Emily because she doesn’t want to “bottle it all up and explode, which seems increasingly inevitable.”

Explode?

The LW is worried about her father and her son, but am I the only one worried about her?

I’m no psychologist, and I generally think psychologizing should be left to the experts. But I did make it through Psych 101, or whatever they called it at my college, and the LW herself says her own demons may be a factor. So here I go.

The LW writes: “I love my dad more than I can explain,” and admits she’s “triggered” by his behavior now. He’s always looked young, and in the past they were sometimes mistaken for a couple. “I always found it really disturbing,” she says, “and establishing boundaries when it comes to perceptions of familial relationships has always been really important to me. This idea that he’s ‘a little bit grandpa, a little bit dad’ really freaks me out.”

That’s when AdviceObsessed started ruminating about Chinatown. That’s the 1974 film most famous for a searing scene in which Faye Dunaway reveals to Jack Nicholson that the young woman she’s been hiding is both her sister and her daughter (“my father and I…”).

Okay! I acknowledge I may be a tiny bit over the line. Still, don’t you think this rises to the level of “see a qualified therapist”?

Emily doesn’t, even though the LW gave her an opportunity by wondering, at one point, whether she’s “overreacting,” which she definitely and bizarrely is. But Emily sees this only as a straight-up case of a parent in the early stages of dementia. The only professional she recommends is someone who can help the LW with the practical challenges of managing that.

Emily can be glib. She doesn’t always read her letters carefully, and that’s a problem, because just by the law of averages, sometimes she’s going to get a serious one. This time she overlooked the elephant in the room, with the fate of demonized grandpas and exploding mothers on the line. In the future, it would be best if she paid more attention.

*The 1974 film with Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway. If you haven’t seen it, or don’t get the reference, search for “my daughter, my sister” on Google or YouTube.

AdviceObsessed has been nit-picking personal-advice columnists for nearly two years now, analyzing, criticizing, and sometimes even praising their work.

So I guess it’s not surprising that with 101 posts in the archives, every now and then, when scrolling for fresh material, I have to look rather a long time.

Given all that, I guess it’s heartening, or not, that there’s one place I can always go when I’m really looking hard for outrages to correct. That dependable source of copy is Slate.

It helps that Slate publishes not one, but three columns: Dear Prudence, Care & Feeding, and How To Do It.

The last of these, I do try to avoid. That’s because the “it” is sex, the column can get pretty granular, and I tend to think this topic is already way overexposed, to everyone’s detriment.

But this week, feeling particularly desperate, I peeked, and that was all it took. Right at the top of the stack was a letter from such a misguided, miserable woman, followed by such bad advice from the columnist, that I knew it was time for a serious intervention.

As always, I’ll start with the letter.

“Like most sexually healthy couples,” the letter-writer begins, “my boyfriend and I consume pornography.”

If you’re thinking: false premise! stop right there! then you’re right. But let’s go on. We’ll come back to this.

Her problem, she writes, is not pornography itself, it’s the specific pornography her boyfriend prefers. He likes pornographic games, because they’re “‘interactive.’” In each game, he plays a male character who “acquires a harem of sexually submissive female characters who are willing to gradually be corrupted into accepting a wide variety of sexual demands from his character.”

“He seems to view women as sex objects,” she says, “and disposable ones at that, or ones to be hoarded.” But when she tells him this bothers her, he gets “defensive,” and tells her it’s just a fantasy.

She’s worried. Is there “a deeper problem?” And since he’s fantasizing about multiple partners, should she leave him?

AdviceObsessed sees more than just multiple partners to worry about. But let’s move on to the answer. It was written, in this case, by Rich Juzwiak, who shares the column with Jessica Stoya.

Rich sees no reason for the letter-writer to leave her boyfriend over “fantasy play.” Not only that, but he rebukes her for criticizing the guy for what what he may see as “an innocent diversion.”

Eventually, Rich tells the LW she has “every right to exit a relationship, even if your rationale is thin and your evidence scant.” Ouch!

It’s hard to know where to start. For instance, Rich says the boyfriend’s game is okay because it’s just a fantasy, but why are our nasty fantasies irrelevant?

Or maybe we start here: On what planet is “fantasy play” about the sexual domination of a “harem” of women an innocent diversion?

Or should we consider whether the LW is closing her eyes to the nature of this domination? She tells Rich she’s upset about the number of women in her boyfriend’s fantasies, but she also mentions the “wide variety of sexual demands” he makes on them. Maybe she’s more upset about that than she realizes.

AdviceObsessed suspects she is, and that takes us back to the LW’s premise: that “sexually healthy couples” consume pornography. The truth is that real sexual health never includes porn, because porn is inherently unhealthy.

That’s because it bypasses the loving-relationship part of sex, in favor of sex only—the physical experience.

And once the physical piece is untethered from love, you soon see sex’s ugly side. Sex is a shape-shifter! It can provide some of our best experiences, but in the wrong hands it can also spin off into the vilest things a human being can do.

That’s why every culture that’s ever existed has tried to regulate sex. These regulations are more or less successful, and more or less authoritarian, but no culture has ever let sex just happen.*

That’s in every era, and everywhere on earth, except for today, in the editorial offices of places like Slate.

I can’t wrap up this post without returning to a point I’ve made many times before: Too many women get bullied into accepting sexual practices that ring alarm bells in their heads, or bruise their hearts. Sometimes the bully tries to make a woman feel like a child, or a prude. Sometimes he browbeats her about sexual health.

Rich explicitly does this. “Look,” he writes, “I understand when people (especially women) are not willing to give men the benefit of the doubt, and you’re under no obligation to do so.”

Generous, isn’t he? But he doesn’t really understand, because he goes on to tell her she’s probably wrong. I hope she ignored him, and listened, instead, to her own true self.

*Margaret Mead said the Samoans did, but then it turned out she’d lied.

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As I’ve said before, I usually like Social Qs, which appears in the NY Times’ Styles section every Sunday, and answers readers’ questions about “awkward social situations.” It has a calm beside manner, and its advice is usually sensible.

But in its column of December 12, which includes answers to four letters, it gets the first two wrong. Even worse, it makes the same mistake with both.

The first letter is from a husband who writes: “My wife has become an eco-warrior,” who “challenges our friends repeatedly about their lifestyle choices.” The letter-writer agrees with his wife about her eco-cause, but can’t support her “moral outrage.”

She doesn’t see how uncomfortable she makes people, but he does. “She seems to care more about the climate crisis than our relationships,” he complains. What can he do?

Social Qs says he should try to persuade her a softer approach would be “more likely to change people’s habits than an angry attack is.”

The second letter is from a man who asked his daughter-in-law if she’d read a novella he’s written. The DIL said she’d be glad to. That was six months ago, and he hasn’t heard a word about his book. Should he speak up?

Social Qs suggests the letter-writer ask his DIL when she expects to get back to him. “You can’t,” it writes, “pretend you never gave her the novella.”

So what mistake does Social Qs make, in both answers? Both endorse confrontation.

Social Qs should have told the first letter-writer it’s never okay to hector other people about their opinions or habits—neither aggressively nor “softly,” whatever that means. Instead of telling his wife she should take a different approach to changing people’s minds, he should tell her to leave their minds alone.

The husband should also tell his wife what he told Social Qs: that if she persists in trying to change their minds, she’ll alienate all their friends and wreck their shared social life.

Social Qs told the father-in-law from the second letter he can’t pretend he never gave her his book. But the father-in-law certainly can pretend—can and should. That’s what his DIL is hoping he’ll do, because while she couldn’t see a way to say no, when he asked her point-blank, it looks like she doesn’t want to read his book, and she definitely doesn’t want to discuss it with him.

If the LW presses her to keep her word, he’ll first embarrass her, then become one more irritant on her to-do list.

Does that mean the DIL is in the right? She’s not. What she should have done was read or skim the book, decide on one or two comments that were neither dishonest nor cruel, then limit herself to ten minutes of full, warm, and encouraging conversation.

But that’s not what she did, so we are where we are now.

Here’s the unadorned fact: Confrontation makes the confronted one uncomfortable, and that undermines relationships. Most people get this. That’s why most prefer to smooth over awkward moments and misunderstandings, then quietly, kindly, let them drop.

Social Qs is usually excellent, but this column was a miss.

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Today ends a longish gap in my usual weekly posting schedule. November threw me for a loop, not that that’s any excuse.

Happily, for my return post I’m tackling a column we can sink all our teeth into. It’s by—you guessed it—Carolyn Hax.

It’s the kind of column that reminds me how grateful I am for readers who can see past yes-no answers, and embrace the big yes-but.

At issue is a letter Carolyn got from a woman whose in-laws offered to help her and her husband buy a house. The young couple accepted the help and bought a four-bedroom, which they love.

Then the in-laws visited, and learned the couple doesn’t plan to have kids. And that’s when the drama started.

The mother-in-law , the letter-writer reports, “was so upset that it was shocking.” She “bawled violently.” She also said she felt “she had bought us a house under false pretenses.”

The father-in-law eventually settled her down. They saw the visit through, but the mother-in-law remained “subdued.”

That was 18 months ago, and today the relationship is “chilly.” The letter-writer’s husband doesn’t mind, but she’s uneasy. She wonders if they should sell the house and return the money. She continues to worry whether they did something wrong, though she also thinks that’s “ridiculous.” What does Carolyn think?

Carolyn agrees it’s ridiculous. The mother-in-law “is entirely in the wrong,” she writes, for retroactively attaching “creepy strings” to the gift. For the mother-in-law to think “you are valuable enough to deserve a house only as breeders of grandchildren,” is “disordered thinking” and “whacked.”

She recommends the couple keep the house. If, however, the LW can no longer be comfortable in the house—if she’s “internalizing” the mother-in-law’s disorder— they probably should return the money. But they should do so in installments, so she and her husband won’t have to move.

What does AdviceObsessed think?

AdviceObsessed agrees the MIL was absolutely wrong to accuse the kids of accepting the house on false pretenses.

So far, so good. But here’s where we get to that “yes-but” I mentioned above.

Even though the MIL was wrong, the letter-writer, her husband, and Carolyn herself are guilty of extraordinary cruelty to her. How did that happen? Because they all fail to see that this is not about the house. It’s about the grandchildren.

The LW says she was surprised by her MIL’s reaction because, among other reasons, she and her husband never told her in-laws they did want kids. Why should anyone have assumed they would?

Easy question. The mother-in-law assumed they’d want kids because it never occurred to her they wouldn’t. Such a position is entirely outside her ken.

But it’s even more serious. Not only did she assume she’d have grandchildren, she already loved those children, and for her to hear they would never happen was like hearing they died.

She did not, I promise you, sob violently over the down payment. Over that, you get mad. Over no-grandchildren, you grieve, intensely.

Does this mean her kids owe her grandchildren? Here’s another yes-but. While AdviceObsessed joins the mother-in-law in wishing they’d have kids, it recognizes that on a huge, life-altering matter like this, adults must go their own way, and they are not obligated to explain.

Still, doesn’t this situation call for compassion? It requires neither an apology nor an explanation, but how about a hug? And how hard would it be to say “I can tell this is really painful for you, and I’m sorry you’re going through it?”

And as for Carolyn? I’ve quoted her heavily to convey not only her substance, but also her tone, which borders on savage. On a topic as manifestly agonizing as this—recall, please, “bawled violently”—I’d suggest Carolyn drop words like “breeders,” “creepy,” “whacked,” “ick” and “disordered.” She uses all of those, and it’s an interesting question, actually: What belief-system makes a columnist respond with such hostility when a woman wants grandchildren?

Still, the letter-writer’s question was about the house. If it were me, I’d offer to return the money, explaining that I cherished the relationship, and continued to regret the misunderstanding. Installments, per Carolyn’s suggestion, would be fine.

After that, the young couple would be fully entitled to let the matter drop, and his parents must make their own peace with it.

Today we tackle that cactus in the garden of work-life balance: the kids. Let’s start by consulting the late, great Nora Ephron.

Specifically, let’s look at one of her lesser-known movies, 1992’s This Is My Life. It’s about a single mother who wants to pursue her professional dream, but worries about her children. Another character tells her to stop worrying, because “kids are happy when their mother’s happy.”

The mother responds:

“No they’re not. Everyone says that, but it’s not true. Kids are happy if you’re there. You give kids a choice: your mother in the next room on the verge of suicide versus your mother in Hawaii in ecstasy, they choose suicide in the next room.”

Funny, right? It’s also true, most of the time.

With that for background, let’s fast-forward more than 30 years, and cut over to the New York Times’ Ethicist column of October 29. This features a letter asking: “How should I weigh my children’s emotional needs against my own need for healing, belonging and growth?”

The letter-writer is a self-described co-parent. For a while, “legal barriers” have limited her* physical access to her kids. To be “a regular, loving presence” in her children’s lives, she uses weekly video calls, “shared activities,” and in-person visits every two weeks.

Now she wants to go live with a relative in another country, to ”continue a long-overdue process of healing after years of trauma and to rebuild my life in a more grounded environment.” The catch is this would reduce her in-person visits with her kids to one per quarter. She asks: “Is it ethically defensible to pursue personal renewal and family support abroad?”

The Ethicist says not only does the LW have a right to care for herself, she has a duty to do so. “You can’t,” he writes, “be the parent your children deserve if you’re unwell or depleted. Even if you saw your duty as entirely to them, that duty would still include preserving your own mental health.”

Then he says the move might not “fundamentally change” her relationship with her kids, because while she’d have less time with them, she’d “feel more grounded and supported,” and “a child benefits from a parent who is emotionally steady, even from afar.”

I’m about to be severe with the Ethicist, so it’s only fair to begin by crediting him for offering sensible advice, most of the time. He often publishes outrageous letters that leave my fingers itching to type out a piece of my mind. I usually don’t, though, because when I read his answers, they tend to cover what I would have said.

Not this time. With this letter, the Ethicist misses two crucial points.

First, retreating from a situation in which you’re important, useful, and in fact, essential is unlikely to be good for your mental health. Even without knowing what the LW’s problems are, I’m happy to go out on this limb. We gain strength by engaging and giving. We heal from the satisfaction of doing the right thing, and of knowing we’re helping.

So that’s the first thing the Ethicist missed. The second and even more important miss is that a parent’s top priority must be her or his children, period.

That doesn’t mean you have to be with them 24/7. Yes, you can hire a sitter and go to the movies; yes, you can work outside the home. Parents have needs, too, as do families, and kids need to understand that.

But it does mean a parent’s major life decisions must be governed, before anything else, by their children’s needs. And the first and way-biggest thing children need is their parents, right there with them, ideally in their house.

In a published comment on this column, a reader writes: “Think of the difference between asking a child how their day was (“OK”) and sharing the day with them.” Exactly.

For unexplained reasons, the Ethicist’s letter-writer can’t live with her children. That’s a given. But her place of residence isn’t given, so it’s up to her to pick the right one, which will be as near as possible to wherever they are.

AdviceObsessed is sorry, but if anyone has to sacrifice in this situation— and it looks like someone will—it must not be the kids.

*No gender is provided, so I’m going, arbitrarily, with female.