Dear Advice Columnist, you’re like a speedball
The combined hit of empathy and schadenfreude
It — and by this, I mean my relationship with Dr. Ruth Westheimer — started out a long, long time ago.
Imagine a small child in an old Connecticut farmhouse, the kind that looked like two squares, the smaller one stacked atop the larger one, kept upright by a chimney down it’s center, smoking weakly, that pins the whole structure to the top of hill on which it sits. A historical building marker is on the house, indicating that it was built in 1840.
This child reads to escape this house. She reads books, magazines, all the outdated encyclopedias, the shampoo bottles in the shower, the cereal boxes, all the cookbooks, the Bible, all the instruction manuals in house, all the books in the Children’s section of the library, all the words in the hymnal and the dictionary. When she is punished, which is often, she is forbidden from reading.
Ask Polly, Dear Abby, Dear Prudence, Carolyn Hax, Ann Landers, Miss Manners, Amy Dickinson, How to Do It, Ester Perel, and frankly, any publication that offers some advice (looking at you, random horoscopes and housekeeping tips in a waiting room) — all of you have been dear and familiar to me at some point; but the gateway drug was from Ladies Home Journal magazine, and it was called “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” and incredibly, each and every marriage addressed could indeed be saved.
Now, this was the 80’s, so you know how marriages were saved, right? The wife pretends everything is ok, and the husband does what he likes. After the wife apologizes for being so difficult and adjusts her attitude, homeostasis is restored, and the husband and ‘experts’ chuckle that for a moment, she had the audacity to think she was people. (Technically, this is how it started off, but look into the archives).
Now…this, folks, this is what Christian Counseling is. (This and praying the gay away). Good Christian menfolk are expecting to get some support for their money when they take their children and wife to a therapist. They want to go once, they want the errant, lower-ranking miscreant to understand they are alone with their nonsense, and with some groveling, said miscreant can get back into their rightful place on the bottom. Not empathy, compassion, and them to answer anything about his behavior, which should not be questioned. What’s a guy gotta do to get some peace?
The point of fascination for me was that the script was always the same. The situation was always miserable. The husband was always a condescending jerk who thought he sounded reasonable. And yet, at the end, it was always…the wife’s fault. It was as if the wife was like the least favorite child, which I could claim to be something of an expert in. And yet, she’d “agreed” to go into this kangaroo-court style counseling session.
If you bothered to look at the house (you wouldn’t), you’d know it was the kind of house that you kept your coat on while inside, even before you’d been greeted by, or more accurately, been met with great suspicion by my unsmiling mother at the door.
She’d have been wiping her hands on a clean dishtowel, and squinting up at you, grey-blue eyes and curly hair that she insisted was blonde but always looked light brown to me.
If you’d been allowed entry, and that’s a big if, you’d only have been allowed to stand on the tiled section of the kitchen. It would have been very cold, and very clean. Bare. My mother, who has a way of making even a basic sentence sound like a threat or an insult, would have asked you why you were there, and you would have wondered if she meant in her house or on the earth.
It would have been quiet, because we were listening. Hard. At this juncture, we will separate the sheep from the goats, or rather, the nurtured from the rest of us.
There are a lot of people who don’t recognise a funny kind of quiet. It’s easy, for me, anyhow, to discount them as ignorant fools, but I must remind myself there’s another word: fortunate. Then there’s my team. The un-nurtured, the survivors, the scapegoats, and the traumatized, the ones who can read silences with the hair on the back of their necks and the nerves in their molars, who learned this before they learned anything else: the world is unsafe, and their mother wasn’t a source of safety, but rather, distress. A loose cannon, a distressing, confusing terrorist that they nevertheless had to rely on for their most basic of needs. The ones who did risk assessments at 3 years old: She’ll definitely hurt me, but I’ll get food, or away, or to grandma temporarily. What is my ROI?
This quiet of intense listening was theatre of war quiet, waiting for the storm quiet; shallow breathe and glare at compatriot siblings lest they breathe too loud to hear the nuances in inflection, tone of voice, and finally the closing door…as if waiting for the locomotive rush of the twister or perhaps, nothing of note — perhaps rage and violence would spare us today; hope and pray that it was a charming deliveryman, lost and looking for directions, rather than a hated grandmother, popping in with a gift for undeserving children, or worse, an idea or unwanted invitation to set my mother off.
It was quiet for another reason. Because it was always quiet. There was no TV, and very little radio. The Christian radio station that was allowed in our home did not come in very well — poor reception, and aside from a few classical records and a few folk records, that was all. All the child-rearing tips from Dr. James Dobson were heard by all of us, which was a decided disadvantage for the parents.
When you understand the basic structure:
- Always make sure the mother has the children by the short and curlies by shame, lack of psychological safety, lots of restrictions (no outside thinkin’!)and beatings
- Always make sure the father has the mother by the short and curlies (same deal, not supposed to be beatings, but if there are, that’s why she’s supposed to forgive)
- Always make sure that the father is afraid that the church men are judging him as weak/inadequate if the #1 &2 aren’t tightly enforced (these guys always cheat, I mean, always, not technically supposed to, but in that subculture, it’s the wife’s fault for not being sexually accommodating and hot enough, plus it’s easier to keep your wife docile if she’s a bit/rabidly insecure)
When you understand the deal, you know it’s a stupid system and then you are sort of…trapped but free. Doing time until you can escape. Unless you drink the Kool-Aid, of course.
Enter advice columns and call-in shows. Do you remember her? Dr. Ruth? When someone would call in, she’d pick up the phone and say “This is Dr Ruth Westheimer. Sexually Speaking, You’re on the Air!”
How did the child with no radio know this? AH HA! The child was a little sneak! She had a cheap little orange AM/FM radio that took batteries that she’d been allowed to keep because it mostly didn’t work. (And an alarm clock radio that she used for light to read books at night).
Should a child have been listening to Dr. Ruth discussing very adult problems late in the the evening on Sunday nights after she came home from attending church (literally the entire day, into the evening)? Maybe the topic was adult, but the topic in some way — is a red herring (I almost said snapper)! The callers were very vulnerable; they didn’t know who else to ask about what were mostly interpersonal sexual problems.
Of course, Dr. Ruth would inevitably ask if they had the ‘problem’ when they masturbated, — “Do you masturbate?” Was one of the first questions, and all the men did, the few women didn’t always if you’re wondering (I recall most of the callers being men). Then she’d drill down and really try to help the beleaguered caller. If they got too flustered, she’d even take the call offline.
I was so relieved to learn that there were people in the world that helped with really embarrassing problems. Because I was so ashamed. All the time.
I was so ashamed that I couldn’t fix my own terrible life, help my siblings, even run away. I had nothing, nowhere to go. I couldn’t even talk about it without risking the little safety my siblings and I enjoyed. I know this for a fact, because I’d tried. Relatives, church people, and school had all just ‘mentioned my anxiety to my mother’, who agreed I was ‘Strong Willed’ and which resulted in an escalation in abuses and restrictions that clearly couldn’t be believed.
When I discovered that there were different kinds of advice columnists, ones that actually seemed kind, ones that were educated, ones that did research or consulted subject matter experts, ones that had worldviews that more closely matched mine or that dug deep to really answer, I forsook all others. Just kidding.
When the good columnists all went behind paywalls, I had to get more selective. I adore Heather Havrilesky of Ask Polly, (how I love the long-windedness and obscenities, as well as the personal stories and amazing writing) and I was always very interested to see what Daniel Lavery (formerly Slate’s Dear Prudence) had to say; Carolyn Hax is someone I wished I worked with; the How to Do It folks, also from Slate, are way to cool for me, but I’d like to have an office next to theirs and eavesdrop, maybe be their dorky friend? I dunno. They might not like that I still giggle about pegging and docking, which are not things I do with my husband as much as imagine suggesting to my (extremely reserved) husband, dressed in lingerie and toys in hand, to see what his reaction would be and then die laughing. See? Uncool.
When I read advice columns, first, I read the question, and I consider it. I think about the writer — what motivated them to write? Is it a real person, or did the columnist write it? Did a friend write it on behalf of another person? What about the other people mentioned in the note? How long ago was it written? How distressed was the person? How honest are they? How self-aware? Honesty only goes so far, in my experience. Ever hear an idiot recount an event that you witnessed or were involved in? It’s almost unbearable. Is there an agenda, besides seeking advice? What could that agenda be?
Then, I read the response. Sometimes, the reply picks up on a detail I missed. I stop everything and re-read the entire letter. Clearly, I was biased, or having an off day. Sometimes, I take it as an indicator that I am so prejudiced against the writer that I cannot be a good arbiter of the conflict described. Sometimes, I just missed an article or pronoun and continue on my merry way. There are days I feel as if I’m reading “Am I the Asshole” on Reddit and think, Everyone’s the Asshole Here! and just stop.
It’s so comforting that other people have problems. It’s a relief that other adults don’t know how to sort through the ugly, exhausting bullshit of life sometimes. Although I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, I’m glad I’m not the only non-perfect person whose mother (or whoever) didn’t love them right and who goes through life invisibly wounded but working so fucking hard and thinking, if only there was someone I could just ask about this stupid shit. Cast your burdens on the internet…
Do advice columns actually help people? Probably, yes, but certainly not always. I’ve seen suicidal teens, abuse victims, write in, and funny, easy problems; I’ve seen practical solutions outlined, and individuals contact the columnist with a solution or the answer; I’ve seen the “problem person” write in and reach out to the letter writer to clarify or apologize; on the other hand, I’ve also read the comments section, which doesn’t always showcase the best of human compassion or even basic reading comprehension.
I think worry rags help by the mere fact that they exist. If you have no one else to ask about your annoying in-laws or toxic boss, how could it hurt? Sometimes you have to tell someone who won’t sigh and roll their eyes.
An advice column is proof that sometimes, when you scream into the abyss, you get a thoughtful answer.
Imagine a small child in Connecticut, in a cold house with an even colder mother. Now imagine the day she discovers there are people — real people, experts even, not advice columnists with fake names — who help people with really humiliating problems, even if they might be her fault.
