It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s…an advice column!

I haven’t done one of these in a while, but they’re always popular, and I’d like to get some more subscribers to raise my income so I have more money to exchange for an increased amount of goods and services. So put some money on the bedside table and let’s go for a ride.

Today, we’ve got three questions submitted directly to the Calm Down Advice Mill™. The first is about a tweet I sent that made people cry. The second is about therapy. The third is about restaurant etiquette and the lingering trauma of a denied recipe.

If you have a question for the unlicensed advice-givers at Calm Down, send it to: helphelphelp@calmdownben.com.

Subscribe now

1) Am I Annoying People When I Say This Stupid Thing I Say? Why?

Dear Calm Down,

I saw your tweet about people saying “I appreciate you” instead of just saying “thanks.” I say that all the time—am I annoying?

— The Gratitude-Haver

Dear Annoying Person,

Yes.

But not in a catastrophic way. Just in the way that makes people privately roll their eyes when they close your email. You're not a monster. I don’t think you should be in jail or anything. You’re just participating in a slight, well-meaning linguistic trend that makes everything weirdly heavy.

Here’s the deal: “Thanks” is a perfectly engineered word. It is compact, correct, and socially graceful. It doesn’t require emotional intimacy. It doesn’t overstay its welcome. It simply acknowledges a transaction and releases both parties with dignity intact.

But sometime in the past decade, “thanks” got downgraded. It became too thin. Too cold. Millennials like me were told that if we didn’t add an exclamation point, people would think we were mad. So we added one. Then people said that still seemed passive-aggressive, so we added a second. And then somewhere along the line, someone decided that even enthusiastic gratitude wasn’t enough—and now we have this weird full-sentence performance: “I appreciate you.”

I explicitly do not mean “’preciate you.” I had never encountered this phrase in the wild, but after sending that tweet, many people mentioned it in their replies. It’s apparently a real thing in the South. I cannot tell you with certainty how I would feel if someone said it to me, but I can imagine it would be less annoying. The fact that it is an informal offhand belies the affectation and over-enunciation that makes “I appreciate you” so grating.

But “I appreciate you” is therapy grammar.

It’s the linguistic equivalent of someone locking eyes with you after you reset their password and saying, “I see your worth.”

It’s not gratitude. It’s aesthetic gratitude. It’s gratitude that wants to be seen being grateful.

The first time I ever encountered it was in an email exchange from a colleague back when I worked at Mother Jones. They were friendly, competent, and entirely sane. But they ended a completely routine back-and-forth about edits with: “I appreciate you.”
Later that day, I began mentioning it to a colleague and said, “I love [name redacted], but you know what’s weird about them?” He instantly cut me off:

“I KNOW. It’s the ‘I appreciate you’ thing. It’s insane.”

We weren’t mad—we were confused. Because this wasn’t someone expressing appreciation for a grand favor. This was someone confirming a character count. It didn’t require feelings.

Fast forward ten years, and now I’m being “appreciated” by the guy at 7-Eleven after I buy a bottle of sparkling water. Not a joke, that is the situation that prompted my tweet. I was at a convenience store in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I handed him a Perrier. He scanned it. The price came up. I tapped my card. It said “approved.” I said “thanks,” and he said, “I appreciate you.”
No, you don’t.
You appreciate that I paid for my item and didn’t disrupt the flow of the establishment by pissing on the floor. Or to put it another way, you appreciate that I met the base-level expectation.

“I appreciate you” is what happens when emotional language gets commodified. “Thanks” is no longer enough because we’ve decided that functional speech is rude. Every sentence now has to come wrapped in faux intimacy. Everything has to sound like a podcast host reading an ad for Blue Apron. “I appreciate you” is how people talk when they’ve been trained to fear clarity and overcorrect by emoting at every turn.

And the worst part is that it doesn’t mean more. It means less!
Because now, when someone actually does appreciate you—you, not just some meaningless basic thing you did—you can’t tell. The phrase has been laundered so many times that it doesn’t hold any emotional weight.

So yes, you are annoying. But only in the way that people become annoying when they adopt social tics out of politeness, not thought. You don’t need to be beaten, unless it’s in the context of a code red, where the beating is a teaching tool. You need to recalibrate.

Say thanks. Say it plainly. Do it with a smile. (That’s what smiles are for!) Let the words mean what they mean, and let your tone do the rest. You’re not being rude. You’re being human.

And if someone gets offended that you didn’t affirm their cosmic worth for forwarding an invoice? They can start a gratitude circle in the breakroom.

—Ben

Share

2) Is My Therapist Allowed To Hate Me?

Dear Calm Down,

I’m pretty sure my therapist doesn’t like me. She’s not rude or anything. I just get this vibe that she’s kind of bored with me. Am I imagining it? Is she allowed to feel that way?

— Paranoid on the Couch

Dear Whacko,

Read more

Let’s do an advice column! If you need some advice, please shoot me an email at helphelphelp@calmdownben.com.

I Let Our Son Get Drunk. My Wife Will Be Mad. Must I Tell Her?

Dear Calm Down,

My wife and I met in high school and fell in love despite having somewhat different teen experiences. I was a jock and a partier. She had strict parents and was studious, shy, and buttoned up. She didn’t consume alcohol or smoke pot until we got to college. (We went to the school to be together.)

Our son was born while we were at college. That was hard, and I don’t recommend it. We’re now in our mid-thirties, and our son is 16. The summer before he entered high school, she and I talked about which path we thought he was more likely to take. She did not want him to spend his teens in a drunken stupor the way I did. Though I think I turned out fine, I love her, and as a concession, we agreed to make a deal with our son. If he made it through all four years of high school without drinking alcohol or doing drugs, we would give him $10,000. 

We both have good jobs and are financially well-off, so we’re going to pay for his college no matter what and give him an allowance, but the $10,000 would be something he could do whatever he wanted with.

He is now a junior in high school, and to the best of our knowledge, he kept up his end of the bargain for the first two years.

Since January, I have been consulting for a firm abroad. It’s been hard. I miss both of them. I was very excited when my son decided to come to visit me for his spring break. Unfortunately, when he got here, he was being a teen. He kept whining about missing his friends and wasn’t interested in doing any of the sightseeing I had planned. This was very disappointing to me since I’d been looking forward to his visit.

On his final night, we went out to dinner, and I ordered a drink. He joked about how in this country, you only need to be 18 to drink legally. He bet me that since he looks a little older than he is that if he ordered a drink, he wouldn’t get carded. For whatever reason, I agreed to this. Sure enough, they did not card him. 

Once it was at the table, he playfully at first but then seriously asked if he could have it without breaking the $10,000 contract. This was the first time he had been anything other than annoying on this trip, and so I said yes. He drank it. I stopped paying much attention but noticed by the end of the meal he was drunk. When the check came, I realized he had ordered a shot and another beer when I was in the restroom.

I did not call him out. The next day he flew back to the US.

I know I need to tell my wife about this, but my question is: do I need to tell my wife about this?

—A bad dad but hopefully not too bad husband

Dear Man Who Hasn’t Gotten A Divorce Yet,

Before anything else, I need to tell you never to mention that detail about him ordering drinks while you were in the bathroom. Ever. To anyone.  You didn’t call him on it in the moment, and it doesn’t make anyone look good. If you did mention how there were more drinks on the receipt, people would reasonably point out that there are other ways that happened. It isn’t conclusive evidence, and you missed your chance to get him to admit it in the moment.

Put the receipt in a safety deposit box and bring it up to him when you’re a grandfather and he’s complaining about his own kids if you want. But otherwise, just forget it ever happened.

Ok, moving on:

There is no way around this: you screwed up. You’re in a bit of a pickle.

In a vacuum, letting your dumb 16-year-old son have a drink or even a couple of drinks isn’t necessarily bad. I think you understand this. But you don’t live in a vacuum. You live in a home with your wife and son (most of the time). You and your wife made a deal with your son. No one made you make that deal. Your wife might have been the motivating force behind it, but you are a party to the contract.

At this dinner, you gave your son a one-time pass to violate the contract. Whether he had one beer or snuck a few more when you weren’t looking is the sort of legalese nonsense that makes people roll their eyes at lawyers. The important fact is: your son has now had alcohol but he has not violated the contract.

Let’s walk through your options:

Read more

A note to readers: The person who sent me this letter is a longtime paying subscriber to my Substack. I am incredibly grateful to my paying subscribers, and I want him to get his money’s worth, so this is long! It also might seem a little harsh at points, but I think he knows—and I hope you know—that harsh is my love language. I don’t get a lot of advice questions directed to me specifically—despite my many pleas! See the bottom of the post for the address!—which is why this column is normally me answering letters published in other places, but if you are a paying subscriber and you send me a question, I am going to think about it a lot! I am going to treat it the way I would if a friend I know in real life asked me for advice, and I was both (a) certain that friend wasn’t a little baby who couldn’t take the truth and (b) trying to make it have appeal to a broader audience. (If you want private advice that I don’t turn into content, become a founding member, and I’ll give you my Signal number and help you find a good place to dispose of a body.) You’re more than welcome to be mean to me in the comments, but please don’t be mean to the writer or each other. Xoxoxo, Ben

Dear Calm Down,

My wife and I don’t have children. She was very clear when we got together that she didn’t want children. I was open to the idea. I still am, but I don’t need to be a father. I’m perfectly satisifed getting to share my life with this woman I love so much.

Recently, she developed a tendency to remark on other people’s children in public. She’ll tell strangers how adorable their kids are or how cute their baby is. These aren’t people we know. I find this behavior bizarre and, frankly, embarrassing. I am not an idiot. We are in our mid-30s. It is possible that this is a sign that she has changed her mind and wants to have children, but when I asked her if we should talk about having kids, she said no. She insisted that she still doesn’t want to have children.

What’s going on? How much should I push her on this?

—Husband Open To Anything

Dear Husband Of Debatable Openness,

Read more

In today’s edition of “People Sent Questions To Other Advice Columnists But I Am Answering Them Because No One Sent Me Any Questions Even Though I Set Up A Whole Email Account For That Purpose,” we have three letters that were published in The Washington Post. The first is about adultery. The second is about alcoholic skiers. The third is about people who smell bad.

I cheated on my wife and got caught and said I wanted a second chance but maybe I don’t

My wife and I have been together for 15 years, married for 11. We have two children. A little over a year ago, I started mentoring a female colleague at work and it became our routine to have a few drinks after work every Friday. I always knew this wasn’t really appropriate, but my wife didn’t worry since she trusted me completely. Over time, our meetups became more frequent and more secretive, we ended up having sex and it turned into a passionate love affair.

A few weeks ago, I got caught by my wife and I came clean. After a lot of tears, and apologies (on my part) and discussion she said she's willing to give me another chance, go to counseling and start fresh.

Before the affair, my relationship with my wife was great, she's upbeat and supportive. She takes care of me, our family and home. She is beautiful, inside and out. She should be enough for me but she's not. I never felt as passionate about her as I did my affair partner, who is so completely different, impulsive, wild and uninhibited. But also needy, clingy and volatile, so life with her is a rollercoaster ride.

Right now, my heart and my head are pulling me in two different directions. My affair partner wants me to divorce my wife and marry her. I don't really want to wreck my family but I'm craving time with her, being separated from her is driving me crazy, I can't think about anything else. I know it’s stupid and might ruin my life but I can't help feeling if I let this woman go, I'll regret it for the rest of my life. What do I do?

You should obviously leave your wife because you’re a soft, weak little man and she can do better. You then can marry your coworker and that marriage probably won’t work out either but at least you will have let your current wife move on.

Let me count the problems here:

You started fucking a women you were mentoring? I mean, I’m not some HR nazi but that seems like questionable behavior. I’m going to assume that this falls on the more innocent side of work relationships just because it’s nice to give people the benefit of the doubt, but uh it’s not the best foundation for a relationship.

“We ended up having sex” is the sort of wording a weak person uses when they aren’t willing to take responsibility for their actions. It was the world that made us have sex!

“I got caught by my wife and I came clean. After a lot of tears, and apologies (on my part) and discussion, she said she's willing to give me another chance, go to counseling and start fresh.”

Actually, doesn’t sound like you did come clean since in the next paragraph, you say that your wife isn’t “enough” for you. What you did in that moment was say things you thought you should say because you were embarrassed and ashamed. If you had actually come clean, you would have perhaps apologized for the betrayal but been honest about the fact that you aren’t committed to the marriage anymore.

The young woman you mentored, screwed, and began a long-term affair with is described as “ impulsive, wild and uninhibited” as opposed to your wife, who is “supportive” and “caring.”

This is not an interesting story.

This is every single affair a middle-aged man has ever had.

A young woman at work, often in and out of love, meets a man who is kind and supportive of her career. She feels things for predictable psychological reasons, and so does he. He is attracted to the things about her that are missing in his life. The youthful impulsiveness and passion he recalls feeling when he hears songs from a few decades ago. There is alcohol involved and they have an affair. Blah blah blah.

People can come back from this story all the time. Marriages don’t have to end because of adultery. But your marriage should end.

You are a cuck. You write in the passive voice because you are unwilling to admit your own volition, unwilling to confess your own desires. The world is something that happens to you.

You knew your relationship with the woman at work was heading towards an affair and you were not even forceful enough to act on that. Instead, it took you months of cocktails to summon the nerve. I would imagine that she is actually the one who made the first explicit sexual overture.

You knew this was wrong and that your wife was at least somewhat cognizant of the potential for adultery since she had said she trusted you before, but it was not until she caught you that you were compelled to tell her the truth. Even then—and most importantly—you still lied when you asked for a second chance while actually considering running away with your manic pixie dream girl.

The reason you weren’t honest with your wife after she caught you is because that would have been the end of the marriage. She wouldn’t have said, “Yeah take your time to think things through.” She would have told you to leave. You are not a strong enough person to willingly approach finality.

This suggests that you will stay with your wife unless she kicks you out. But it’s hard work to recover a marriage in trouble, and you are too lazy and stupid to do that work. If you stick around, you’ll both just politely hate each other until you die.

You should man up and leave your wife. It’s not only the nice thing to do for her, but it also would represent some form of growth in you. Hamlet only gets to dither so long.

Here’s what will happen next: Maybe you and the coworker get married. Maybe. But maybe not. Either way, the relationship will change on a fundamental level. It will no longer be secret and subversive and sexy. It will be boring. You will come to hate her clinginess, neediness, and volatility more than you do now. They will overtake the fun, sexy passion you focus on now.

And she will do the same. It might not be an HR violation to date a mentee at work, but that doesn’t mean the power dynamic isn’t real. She is attracted to you in part because she associates you with the next stage of her life journey. That doesn’t last forever. Maybe you two will be together forever. Sounds like you both have a bunch of emotional problems, and sometimes two jagged sets of psyches fit perfectly together.

But probably not.

She’ll probably leave you in a few years, and you’ll have a slow-motion nervous breakdown.

But, hey, when you see people in films ruin their lives during a midlife crisis, you’ll at least be able to be like, “it me.”

Someone drank too much on my husband’s ski trip. Should I end my friendship with that drunk’s wife?

Dear Amy: My husband has gone skiing with seven of his male peers for 17 years. One of these friends, “Patrick,” is an alcoholic whose out-of-control behavior during previous ski trips has been difficult for them to tolerate. Last year, Patrick was so offensive and unruly during a ski trip that it was the last straw, so the guys will not be inviting him to join them again. My husband has blocked him on his phone.

Although all agreed that this shunning was justified, the loss of this friend caused my husband great emotional pain. I am from a family who has suffered from generations of alcoholism. I have a low tolerance for the pain caused by that sad addiction. As a result, the shunning is not a problem for me.

However, I am friends with Patrick’s wife, who knows he has been banned from the ski group for his frightening behaviors. She is choosing to continue to support him and his painful, risky lifestyle, trusting that he will recover. Although none of us share her trust in him, she is asking for “understanding” from the ski group and is asking for me to maintain his friendship.

Read more

Welcome to another installment of the Calm Down advice column, where I dispense better advice than the famous advice columnists. Today we are looking at a letter that was sent to the Washington Post’s Miss Manners. The letter and the columnist’s response are both terrible.

Dear Miss Manners: As I begin returning to the office more frequently, I’m increasingly being told “You look great” (or variations thereof) by co-workers and managers I’m seeing for the first time in months or even years. Being told this doesn’t make me uncomfortable, nor does it stroke my ego. But where I get hung up is how to reply!

I don’t normally comment on others’ appearances, especially in the workplace. The thought of saying “You, too” makes me feel uneasy — especially when the person is not the same gender as I am — as it seems similar to telling them that I’m thinking about their appearance. My automatic response ends up just being “Thanks.” (Of course, I don’t end it there; I’ll usually then ask about their life or work and try to catch up.)

For what it’s worth, when I’m in the other person’s shoes, I usually lead with something like, “How have you been?” or “What’s new?” as opposed to “You look good.” I don’t think people ever said this to me before the pandemic, so I don’t recall having this issue during Before Times. So, are there good alternatives to “You too” or “Thanks” in this situation?

HAHAHAHahhaahahahahahahahhahaahahahahhahahahahahahaahhahahahahahahahhahahahahahhahahahahhahahahahahhahahahahahaHAHAHAHAHAHAHHhaahhahahahahahahhahhaha.

After the first paragraph of this letter, I thought, “oh well, this person just doesn’t know how to interact with humans.” But then the second paragraph! You’re actually caught up in some sort of bizarre psychodrama about how complimenting someone’s looks is always bad.

Then the third paragraph reveals that you actually think these coworkers who are giving you these nice compliments (which, notably, don’t make you uncomfortable) are unreconstructed Neanderthals.

And finally, there is this utterly crazy reference to the pandemic maybe being to blame for this. Like, these other people used to know that it’s uncivilized to say, “You look great,” but then they spent a few years WFH, and now they’ve gone mad and are complimenting looks right and left!

(Why do you not remember them complimenting your appearance before the pandemic? Maybe you were less attractive then, or, more likely, you have a terrible memory and it is you who has gone stark-raving mad over the last three years.)

There are times in life when you shouldn’t compliment someone’s looks. You shouldn’t catcall women on the street, for instance. Cat-calling is bad for a number of reasons, but at the most basic level, it is bad because it is men using a woman as a prop in their own play with their friends. You are not whistling at them because you expect to realistically pick her up and go to a motel and screw like rabbits. It’s about engaging in the age-old male bonding ritual of reducing women to meat—and telling them about it.

There are lots of next-level cultural reasons why this behavior is bad for men’s minds and leads to toxic masculinity and stuff that then is bad for women and society, but you don’t need to go that deep. Much closer to the surface is the fact that catcallers are interfering with the lives of the women they whistle at and harass, who are trying to go to work and or walk down the street; the cat-callers are imposing on them their presence and reminding them that for a lot of people they’re just a set of tits.

What is not a reason catcalling is bad is that someone thinks you’re attractive.

Being attractive is nice. It’s certainly superior to being unattractive. If they were value-equal, people would walk around in potato sacks caked in mud. It’s not the only thing that matters, or even the most important, but it is a factor in life.

The entire reason it is generally considered rude to call someone ugly is because our looks matter a great deal to us. Every person who has ever lived has cared about their looks somehow. Maybe they don’t care about it the way I do or the way you do, but they care about it in their own way.

Insulting someone’s appearance is a good way of hurting their feelings because it is such a fraught part of our psyche. And by the same token, complimenting someone’s appearance is a uniquely powerful compliment. It can turn frowns upside down. Not in every situation! Sometimes it is bad. Sometimes it’s a stranger and you don’t want to know what they think. Sometimes it’s a boss and it can make you feel uncomfortable. Sometimes the person giving the compliment is a weirdo and their delivery comes off as patronizing. Sometimes a lot of things.

But sometimes, it’s nice.

Most people get this. Most people spend time on their appearance or watch their weight or try on clothes in the shop to make sure they fit, and they know that in certain situations, they like being told their effort was not a waste. And when they are giving someone else a compliment, they give them the compliment they themselves want.

This is why responding with just “thanks,” or “How was your weekend” or “reading any nice books lately” is such a profoundly mean thing to do.

Maybe you truly don’t give a shit what your coworkers think about your appearance, but they definitely do!

There may be people who, for personal, political, or societal reasons, believe no one should ever comment on their appearance. Maybe those people exist.

But those people are not the people you work with.

You work with people who do not think it is dirty or illicit or problematic to say, “You look nice.” They speak the language. That is the only thing I know about them. Maybe they’re stupid, ugly, embezzling drug-addicts. I don’t know. But from your letter, I know that they like and appreciate aesthetic compliments. It’s a tune that pulls them onto the dance floor.

By not responding, “Thanks, so do you!” you are saying something much worse. You are saying, “Thanks, you don’t.”

Read more

Yo, MTV Raps! Welcome to another installment of “Here’s An Advice Column Because I Couldn’t Think Of Anything Else To Write About” In this week’s episode, I’m picking on Slate again because they really can’t stop asking for it. The second question is from a now-deleted post where someone wrote in complaining about their son reading the Bulwark. But we begin with the first question, which is about a parent who wants to take two of their three children on vacation.

Do I Have To Bring All My Children On My Family Vacation?

Dear Care and Feeding,

I have three kids: two girls and a boy. My oldest daughter is my biological daughter and our younger two are adopted. My oldest, “Annie,” was 3 years old when we adopted her sister and 6 when we adopted her brother. When Annie was 2, we took her to Disneyland. All three kids have been to Disney World, but only Annie has been to DL. My other daughter is turning 10 this year and my son has been having some medical problems, so we’d like to take the two of them on a fun trip for their birthdays. We would take them during the offseason (fall) to save money.

If I took Annie, it would cost more, and since Annie is in middle school it would be a lot more work to make up. Is it okay to leave Annie behind since she’s already been? I know life isn’t supposed to be fair, but it seems weird to leave a kid behind, even if it’s only for a long weekend. Thoughts?

—Three Kids, One Vacation

Slate’s answer is: you need to take all three of your children to Disneyland.

This is humorless, obvious, and wrong.

I mean, sure. It would be easier to take the child on the vacation. It doesn’t seem to add prohibitive cost to take three kids to Disneyland instead of two. They don’t need their own suite at the hotel.

But let’s pretend that there really is a hard ceiling on the budget for this trip and there are no other frugal cuts to be made but to leave your eldest child at home. Let’s also assume that you have at your disposal some free childcare options for the kid if you do abandon them. 

In this situation, the choice is between a) taking two of them on vacation and b) not going on vacation. This is America, not some Maoist farm where everyone has equal amounts of nothing. 

Is it ok to take some but not all of your kids on vacation? Yes.

The easiest way to do this is to take one of them on vacation. I went to Greece with my dad when we were kids. My siblings weren’t invited. My sister went to Nepal with my mom when we were kids. I wasn’t invited. My brother went to Japan with my dad when we were kids. My sister and I were not invited. 

This situation is very easy to explain to the uninvited: it is a bonding opportunity for the parents to be with one of their kids and the other kids will have their own moments in the sun.

Somewhat harder is the idea of taking multiple children while leaving one at home. But it is certainly not impossible! 

For instance, as this letter writer claims, the eldest child is in middle school and “it would be harder” to get them out of school. This is total bullshit since we’re talking about “a long weekend” ie missing one day of school but lean into the lie. It’s not just hard to get her out of school; it’s impossible! Midterms are coming up, honey! In this family, we do not intentionally abrogate our solemn responsibilities to education. 

In a world where the child would have to miss multiple days of school, it is totally reasonable for a parent to say, “Sorry, you can’t come because you have school,” which makes this a great excuse. A perfect lie is when you only have to make one minor change to the facts of the case. Everything in the logic structure is solid and true except for one tiny exaggeration. In this case, that exaggeration is just how important it is that they not miss school. 

Now your child might say, “Well,  why don’t we just wait to go to Disneyland until spring break?” And you’ll say, “We can’t afford that because of inflation,” or whatever.  And they’ll say, “What’s inflation?” and you’ll roll your eyes and say, “This is why you can’t miss even one day of school!” 

And if they push you too much on this, you can always turn it around on them. I’m sure your daughter isn’t an angel. She’s probably missed her homework once or gotten in trouble for something. You can say, “Your teachers won’t let you miss even a day because you’re already in hot water from the time you fell asleep during biology.” It’s their fault! If they had just been a better student—a better daughter—they could have come to Disneyland.

Let’s say you don’t want to go down this road of using school as an excuse (for whatever reason). You have other options!

You say you want to take the kids to Disneyland off-peak in the fall. So you don’t have a hard and fast date you have to do this trip. It just needs to be in the autumn. You say your eldest kid is in middle school. Do you know what happens in the fall at middle school? The fall dance. 

For whatever reason, the weekend of the middle school fall dance is the only weekend you can do the Disneyland trip. Your daughter will want to go to the dance instead of Disneyland and will beg you to let her stay at her friend’s house that weekend and not go to Anaheim. You can hem and haw and then say, “Fine, but only if your grades improve/learn the piano/clean the gutters.” 

But, Ben, what if my eldest daughter doesn’t want to go to the dance because she has crippling social anxiety and would actually be grateful for an excuse to skip it?

Presumably, you know your daughter well enough to know what she does or doesn’t want to do between September and December. If there is nothing you can think of on her calendar that she would prefer to do than go to Disneyland, then 1) you’re a terrible parent, and you’ve raised a deeply depressed child, 2) you just need to trick her into preferring anything over Disneyland.

Your daughter is in middle school. You’re not playing chess with Bobby Fischer. You can manipulate her fairly easily. Disneyland is a place for dumb, immature little kids, not sophisticated, mature pre-teens. 

Put your two other kids to bed one night and let your oldest kid stay up a little later. Then you and your spouse sit around the kitchen table with them having “adult talk.” Talk about your jobs or complain about some idiot neighbor you don’t like, whatever. Humorously. Be laughing. Let your eldest child feel like she has graduated to the adult section, and, damn, it’s fun in here! Essentially you should let her have a non-alcoholic beer. Even if you don’t actually let her have a non-alcoholic beer. Let her feel like you did.

Then find some reason to bring up Disneyland. Maybe one of you says that your youngest wants to go to Disneyland. You then roll your eyes and groan. “I can’t wait for them to grow up so we can stop going to that boring place for babies. I wish we could go someplace cool that even [eldest child] would like. Like Baja or Hawaii or even Six Flags because at least Six Flags has adult roller coasters and not baby roller coasters.” Then your spouse will say, “But they are so young! You can’t expect them to be as mature as [eldest child].” Eventually, your kid is going to pipe up and agree with you that Disneyland is for losers. That’s when you look at your spouse. “i got an idea: how about you take the little kids to Babyville,” then you turn to your eldest kid. “And you and I hit up the race track and put some money on the ponies?” (Or whatever.)

The absolute best way to sell this would be for only one parent to take the two kids to Disneyland and the other parent to take the eldest on some cheap thing at the same time. (Would also be even cheaper!)  But if you don’t want to do that for whatever reason, then just modify that line to “we take the babies to Babyville while our cool oldest child is in school and then when she’s out of school, we take her and just her to Warped Tour this summer?”

The point is you are tricking the kid into taking the worse prize, the way the Price Is Right tricks people into taking dinette sets instead of cash.

If none of these options are striking your fancy, how about just being honest with her? “We can’t afford to take all three of you, which is unfortunate,  but Disneyland literally has nothing that Disneyworld does not have and you really aren’t going to be missing much and I’ll make it up to you down the line. Here is an IOU/Get Out Of Jail Free card.” 

Subscribe now

I want to circle back to the Slate answer to wrap this up. “Whatever the cost would be to bring her along would be nothing compared to the cost of the resentment she would feel if you left her behind.”

This is nonsense. The trip has a real cost that must be paid in American currency. The value of that currency goes up and down. One thing that is more inflationary than the US Dollar is the resentment children have for their parents: the resentment mint never stops printing, and each memory is less valuable than the last. 

So much parenting advice is predicated around this fear the kids will resent you forever because of some minor thing that happened in their childhood. It’s a complicated phenomenon. I wish I could say that the fears are exaggerated and that that doesn’t happen, but that’s wrong. It does happen. In fact, it happens no matter what. No matter what you do, your child will resent you for some things that you did in their childhood. They will be things you don’t even remember. They will be things that your child is misremembering. And some of them will be real! Life is complicated and life is unfair, and sometimes parents have to do things that their children rightfully resent. But that’s life. 

It doesn’t mean they hate you. If anything, it means they love you so much that every little thing has the potential to mean more than it should. You can’t worry too much about doing things that your child might one day talk about in therapy because the only limiting factor to the things your child will one day talk about in therapy is the length and frequency of the sessions. 

All you can hope is that your children understand by their 20s or 30s or 40s or by the time they put you in the ground that you’re just a human who did your best and, like every other human who has ever existed, 98% of the things that you did in your life were unthinking and unintentional, and that mistakes were made but that none of it really matters because the essential truth, the only relevant truth, is that you love each other and if you had one wish and only one wish you’d spend that wish on them.

And if they do know that then they aren’t going to really give a shit that one weekend in the fall of 2023 they didn’t get to go to Mickey’s ToonTown.

—Ben

The Advice Column Slate Actually Deleted Because They Got Dragged So Hard

Read more

Hey there, cats and kittens! Welcome to another installment of “Knock Knock. Who Is There? The Advice Columnist. The Advice Columnist Who? The Advice Columnist With A Gun So Don’t Get Cute.” In this week’s episode, we have two questions: the first was sent to the New York Times SocialQs column, and the second was sent directly to Calm Down. If you have questions for us, please email helphelphelp@calmdownben.com.

To Compliment A Neighbor On Their Looks

I bumped into a neighbor in the lobby of our building. I hadn’t seen her for a while, but it was obvious she had undergone extensive cosmetic surgery. Not to be judgmental, but I can’t imagine she thinks no one notices. I felt uncomfortable having a conversation without first addressing the elephant on her face. And it seemed disingenuous to say: “You look wonderful! What have you done?” How would you handle this?

NEIGHBOR

The New York Times answer here is very judgmental:

“Cards on the table: I am appalled by your question,” the columnist writes. “By your own account, this woman is an acquaintance whom you bump into occasionally, not a close friend. Why on earth do you feel entitled to comment on her appearance, much less claim that it’s a prerequisite to other conversation?”

Unless neighbors ask you specifically about their changed appearance, say nothing. As for conversation starters, go anodyne: “I haven’t seen you in ages! How are you?” Our acquaintances know if they’ve had cosmetic surgery. They don’t need us to tell them.

This is so dumb lol. If you bump into someone you know and realize that they look totally different for the better, it is absolutely fine to congratulate them on it! They got the surgery for a reason, after all.

You shouldn’t be weird about it or creepy but saying, “Wow, you look great” is actually a compliment. People like receiving compliments.

There are situations where men giving compliments to women on their physical appearance can be creepy. Catcalling is a good example. But the social prohibition on catcalling has led to a sort of moral panic about complimenting people on their physical appearance at all, which is insane! Physical appearance isn’t the most important thing in the world, but it does take up a lot of our psychic space. It’s why calling someone ugly is such an effective insult. It hurts anyone’s feelings. Hitler and Stalin would be brought to tears by the right insults to their appearance.

Similarly, complimenting their appearance is something everyone loves so long as it doesn’t feel like you’re hitting on them.

The strange part of the question to me is “it seemed disingenuous to say: “You look wonderful! What have you done?”  Why? Because you know she had plastic surgery? It seems like you think plastic surgery is something people should be ashamed of. I don’t think that’s true, but maybe she does feel that way. The obvious answer is to just say, “You look wonderful,” and leave it at that.

The biggest problem for the letter-writer is that they seem like someone who struggles mightily with extemporaneous conversations. Like, whether or not you lend voice to the thought that the person looks better than they had before, it shouldn’t derail your entire conversation. And it shouldn’t haunt you days later to the extent that you need to write to an advice columnist about it.

You are imbuing your compliment with too much meaning. You will not make your neighbor’s day. You will also not ruin it. If you earnestly thought she looked better, then it is totally fine and good to share that compliment with her because that’s how natural conversations flow. If you didn’t say it for whatever reason, that’s fine too. Just move on.

Not every moment of every social interaction is worth panicking about. Calm down.

—Ben

On Confessing To Adultery

Dear Calm Down,

I have been married for six years. I love my wife, but a few months ago we were going through a rough patch and I had an affair with a woman I met through work. It wasn’t serious. It only happened a few times. I ended it because I came to my senses. It will truly never happen again. My wife does not know about this and recently, our relationship has improved. We’re getting along like we used to. We’re sleeping together more. (During the rough patch we went months without making love.) But I feel bad about the affair and I feel a moral obligation to tell her. I think the reason I haven’t is that I’m a coward, but when I recognize I am being a coward about something, I force myself to do it. Should I bite the bullet and admit my mistake?

Dear Adulterer,

Read more

In today’s edition of “People Sent Questions To Other Advice Columnists But I Am Answering Them Because No One Sent Me Any Questions This Week Even Though I Set Up A Whole Email Account For That Purpose,” we have two letters that were published in Slate. The first is about a woman who hates her friend’s children. The second is about a woman who hates her own.

The Mom Who Hates Her Friend’s Kids

Dear Care and Feeding, 

I recently hosted an event at my house. My best friend came with her husband and children, 4 and 6, who I love very much. I had never seen these children outside of their own home (thanks, COVID) and I was surprised at their behavior. I was even more shocked by the response (or lack thereof) from their parents. They were running around, throwing my child’s toys, and even hanging from my banister. When I tried to redirect, the children either told me “no” or the parents made some excuse. Even when I said I was worried they’d get hurt, they didn’t seem concerned as “it happens at our house all the time.”

Their father also laughed at their antics, and I had to firmly tell one of the children what I expected him to do (pick up the toys and hand them to me—do not throw them in the air and let them fall to the ground), which he did. The parents were strict on certain things, like making them say please and thank you when they wanted something, but they were lax with other situations. My best friend means the world to me, but I don’t know how to approach this, or subsequent get-togethers, as my husband doesn’t want them in our house again, and the other guests were equally vocal to me. Any advice on how to handle this situation without losing my best friend?

—Not On The Same Page

Dear Not On The Same Page,

Calm down, Lilith Crane from Frasier.

Let me give you some facts about the way the world works before we talk specifically about your letter, ok?

The details of a person’s life are almost always acquitting. You don’t name lobsters you intend to boil, and you don’t learn the backstories of people you want to dismiss as cartoon villains.

A person may do evil, but that does not mean they are an evil person, if you know enough about them to empathize with them. This applies to children too. 

Children misbehave. Sometimes they are hyper and annoying and sometimes they are tired and annoying. If you are their parent, you spend so much time with your children that you also get to experience them in the Goldilocks moments when they’re delightful. And because you’re their parent, you have vast supplies of knowledge about their lives, their souls, and their hearts. This supply is exceeded by your inexhaustible empathy for your children. 

When they act up, you can tell yourself in an instant an entire novel’s worth of backstory. 

You see the best in your children, but you, understandably, do not instinctively do that with all children. As you get to know another child, you learn more about them, and your familiarity breeds fondness, which is why people do often lend love to children outside of their family who they spend lots of time with. 

This situation described in the letter is about two children you have no familiarity with. You are very fond of their parents, but fondness for a parent does not equal fondness for their children.

No one likes other people’s children at first. I mean, pedophiles do, but aside from them, it’s pretty standard for adults to love their own kids but find other people’s kids mostly annoying. Having thoughts of not liking other people’s kids is human and normal and something that lives inside of you. And that’s where it should stay. Discretion is the act of an adult and that is why lending voice to these thoughts is not something people normally do. 

Children drive their parents mad and their parents love them! Of course, you hate children who reside on the periphery of your existence, mean nothing to you specifically, and only ever come into your focus when they’re throwing a tantrum at the airport. But you keep it to yourself. (Unless you’re a psychopath.)

You know someone’s child annoys you, but you also know that you don’t have the full picture and are not interpreting them as generously as their parents, so you fake it. You grin and bear it.  You put up with them and it sucks and you put up with them and it fucking sucks and put. up. with. them. because. you. do. not. want. to. go. insane. and then at some point down the line, you realize that you have grown to know them and think kindly of them and have good hopes for them and then it becomes much easier to put up with them.

Now there are exceptional cases, obviously. Some kids are terrible swine. But you can’t know that from one afternoon. 

The event

What sort of event was this? I’m imagining a BBQ or something like that where there was a mix of adults and children in a casual situation. (If that is wrong and this was a formal function, then you made a mistake by inviting these children you’d never met.)

Subscribe now

The children’s behavior

These kids are 4 and 6. They are young. They are also coming out of the pandemic and that played a role in their early development. They are experiencing things for the first time. I’m sure the pandemic was pretty rough for you and your husband…and you’re adults!

Sometimes kids that age act up. It doesn’t sound like they burned your house down. It sounds like a pretty standard children misbehaving sort of thing. This means you are not allowed to conclude they are rotten after a few hours spent with them in a new environment.

The children’s father

You say he laughed at his kid’s hijinks. You seem to suggest that means it was an endorsement of the kids’ behavior and from that you conclude that the father is a bad parent who lets them get away with banister-hanging every day. Maybe this is true, but you don’t have enough information to conclude that. Parents get very anxious when their children act up in public, especially when they do it in front of their friends. They get flummoxed and embarrassed and flummoxed embarrassed people sometimes awkwardly try to minimize their child’s behavior. 

Your husband

You say your husband doesn’t want the kids back in his house. Property laws are what they are so you are under no obligation to let these kids back over. But I think your husband is jumping to conclusions. I’m sure your children have acted up once or twice. Does he think they should be banned for life from McDonald’s because one of them pissed in the ball pit?

Your other guests

The ones you say complained to you about the children.

This might be true. Maybe they did complain about it in strenuous terms. But I think they probably did it in less strenuous terms, and if they are also parents then they may have done it in the context of bragging about their own children. Or to compliment you for your children. 

It’s also possible, I must point out, that they didn’t complain and that you either intentionally or not are conflating everyone at the event with your husband. It’s ok if you are doing that. You’re imperfect! And it fortunately leads to the answer to your question.

How should you broach this topic with the parents of the Bad Kids?

Don’t.

I really think you all might be overreacting. You need to give the children more opportunities in other contexts before you pass judgment on their eternal souls. 

If the kids are such little rats then you are probably not going to be the first people to complain about them. You will not be delivering new information. There is nothing to gain.

It’s just going to embarrass the parents and make them defensive. There is no version of talking to them which doesn’t involve them talking shit about you privately to each other the first chance they get. That’s not the end of the world, but it is something to keep in mind.

There is just virtually no world in which you bringing this up to them actually leads to positive outcomes. Parents aren’t wired that way. Humans aren’t wired that way. If they need to be stricter with their children, that is something they have to decide to do on their own. (And they may have well decided this already! You don’t know! You’ve only seen them with their children once!)

Now, if it keeps happening and you decide you really can’t have these kids in your house because of insurance reasons, and you’ve made peace with the fact that no good will come from it, but you still insist on scratching the itch and confronting the parents…blame the guests.

How to make this particular mistake

Couch all of your husband and your complaints in a way that attributes them to your unnamed guests. DO NOT NAME THE GUESTS. You will be asked to provide their names but do not do it. Anyone who has ever watched a soap opera should understand that will only create new drama.

In the conversation, take the parents’ side. You are enlightened and know the children are little angels who were just having a bit of a bad day, but your guests? Well, they are unenlightened judgers. 

“Oh, you know how [our social circle] can be,” etc…

 There is a vanishingly small chance that this will embarrass the parents enough to actually make them do whatever it is you assume they aren’t doing. That has never happened in the history of parents having friends but, you know, one day a lemming might fly.

They will still get defensive and talk shit about you behind your back, but you can hope that is overwhelmed by the detective work they will be doing trying to guess who the unnamed guest was with a stick up their ass.

This also sets the table for you to tell them in advance next time you have an event that all of your guests need to get babysitters.

What will happen here is that they will say, “Well, at least you’ll be able to see our cherubic kids in one on one playdates. Maybe we can all go to the park for a picnic next week.”

If you and your husband really refuse to see these children ever again, even when it’s just you and your kids and them and their kids, then go to a therapist. And while you’re waiting for an appointment to open up to get your brain examined, lie to them and say you’re busy next week and your husband gets hay fever and can’t go to the park.

Patronizingly,

Ben

The Mom Who Thinks Her Daughter Is A Freak

Read more

Welcome, my friends, to the show that never ends! By which, I mean, of course, the recurring feature “Advice? I’ll Give You Some Advice! But You Might Not Like It!” Our first entry today comes courtesy of Brianna Flores and is a question someone submitted to Slate. Our second entry is the first question I have ever tackled that was submitted to me specifically. If you would like to submit the second question original to Calm Down, please email me! The contact information is at the bottom.

Uh Oh, The Chick I Have Been Sleeping With For A Year Is Apparently Smarter Than Me

Dear Prudence,

I am a straight man in my 30s who has been friends with benefits with “Alice” for over a year. It’s been a good, safe pandemic arrangement; Alice is fun, cute, and it’s been nice to find someone I really enjoy hanging out with and enjoy sex with and is on the same page about not being in a relationship. Uncomplicated, is what it has been, I guess, until recently.

Alice has mentioned before that she writes, and recently shared that she’d sold a story for a little bit of money, and received an honorable mention in a contest. I got a weird feeling I couldn’t place. Alice directed me to some of her work, and I read it, and ended up searching and finding a lot of more of it. She’s really, really talented, much more than I had ever stopped to consider, and I don’t know why it bothers me to find story after story that she’s written. I scribble a bit, mostly stray thoughts and RPG game worldbuilding and character stuff, but I had never thought of publishing. It shouldn’t bother me that Alice has, or that her stuff is frankly so much better than I could ever dream of producing. But it has. I am jealous and intimidated and don’t know what to do. The cute lady I eat pizza with and watch movies with and fool around with is now … someone who has done something I never could and is, let’s face it, likely smarter than I am. I mean, I had never thought she was dumb by any stretch of the imagination before, and have always thought her to be intelligent and really witty and capable of having a good argument or discussion over lots of topics, but this seems different, like the proof is solid and obvious that I don’t compare. Is there any going back from this?

— Jealous FWB

OK, buddy. Let’s be real for a second.

I have dated quite a lot in my life. I have also slept with many more women who I didn’t date and sort of just had one-two-three night stands. Setting aside the women I really never knew well enough to say anything about, I have definitely dated or had extended dalliances with women who were less capable than me in certain fields or less knowledgeable about certain subjects, but I do not think I have ever either had a fling or dated a woman who was less intelligent than me. Like, given my circumstances or education or profession, those women would have been just as capable as me in my own best fields.

This isn’t an IQ game, ok? If you have a 100 IQ or you have a 130 IQ, for all intents and purposes that are relevant in life, you have the same god-given capacity.

I don’t consider myself a terribly smart person—and maybe you do. And maybe you’re right. Maybe you have a 160 IQ and you went to MIT and invented a robot that cures cancer and you can count cards in Vegas.  But you’re probably not right. You’re probably in the same average intelligence bucket that myself and 7 out of 10 people you meet on the street are in.

I have, however, dated and been in extended relationships with women I am certain are smarter than me. Maybe their minds worked differently so I was still “wittier” or whatever, but they clearly had more processing power than I do.

Thousands of years of gender norms tell us that this should be some sacrilege. But the past was terrible and everything that went on then was idiotic and this is no different.

Dating someone smarter than you is wonderful.

(It might not be wonderful in every case! Intelligence is different than personality and maybe their intelligence manifests itself in a way that makes them insufferable.)

But in general, it is wonderful. Because of those same social norms I criticized, smart women are overwhelmingly not insufferable in the way that smart men can be. Society never told them that it is the natural order of things that they be smarter than their male partners. Society told us that. (Less so now, but for thousands of years, etc…)

Dating a smart, unpretentious person who doesn’t put you down is Heaven. They will make you think about things you haven’t thought about. They will better you. Their intelligence will raise the aggregate intelligence of the team. And that’s what a couple is: a team.

It sounds like this woman you’ve been dating is exactly who I am describing. She never made you read her writing. She never forced her own abilities in your face.

You—belatedly—have discovered a side of her that is good; a part of her that is a gift. You should have expressed enough interest in her life to have discovered it earlier.

If I were her, I probably would have stopped sucking your dick when, after a few months, you kept just not being terribly curious about my career and interests. But maybe she had an absent father or whatever and you’ve lucked into someone better than you who probably has some self-esteem problems.

This is an advice column so my advice to you is this: don’t fuck this up.

Subscribe now

Why do you feel weird about the fact that she is so smart?

Well, maybe it’s because you’re a prick lol.

Maybe not! Maybe it’s because you feel guilty for being so dismissive of her until now. Or maybe because you have implicit gender biases which you inherited and lay mostly dormant in the back of your mind. We all have implicit biases and they don’t make you a prick. But, it must be said, there is a chance you are just a prick who wants to be the smartest person in the room.

If that is it, then you should go to an Outwards Bound program or something and get bullied until you grow the fuck up.

If it’s the implicit bias thing or the feeling guilty thing, then you should count your lucky stars that those flaws in you haven’t led to the dissolution of this relationship.

Slate, in their response to you, suggests that perhaps you are made uncomfortable because until now you have never considered this woman more than a plaything. Slate further suggests you consider that she also thinks of you as a plaything.

Maybe both or either of those things are true. But a plaything or a fuck buddy or whatever you want to call it is another way of describing the 2^nd act of 50% of romcoms. It’s the casualness inherent to the beginning of a romance. But romances either die a plaything or live long enough to become something more.

Here is the part where I tell you something good.

You read her writing because you are realizing that this is maybe something more.

And the really good news is: you’re too fucking stupid to have gotten to that point without subtle prompting from her, which means she also is thinking of this as potentially something more.

You are both thinking about maybe making this a real thing.

This is a moment, friend.

This is an important juncture. It’s not the last one you’ll ever have, but it is a big one. This affair ends…or it doesn’t—and it evolves.

The pandemic is over. You no longer have a global disruption to help you out. You either turn back towards land or take your paddle and row towards the horizon.

You probably won’t ever get to the horizon. They tend to move away the closer you get, but the journey is the fun part. And it doesn’t mean you’re going to move in together and then get engaged and then get married in Ireland on horseback and then have babies and move to West Egg and have brunch every day. Those things probably won’t happen. You’ll probably break up for some dumb reason neither of you has thought of yet. The boat will capsize and you’ll be forced back to the port of beginnings, where sailors trade stories of false starts and regret.

But maybe not. And what she knows that you don’t because she is smarter than you is this: maybes are what make life worth living.

After crosses and losses,

Ben

Share

Why Does The Woman Of My Dreams Think I Am Such A Shmuck?

Read more

Welcome back to “Advice? I’ll Give Ya’ Some Stinking’ Advice”! It’s been a few weeks since I’ve done one of these because like everyone else I was a bit caught up in the midterm election and Elon Musk buying Twitter. So let’s get back on the horse! In today’s edition, I’m looking at a question that was sent to Slate. In many ways it is a traditional evergreen parenting question, but in one way it is very strange indeed.

Dear Care and Feeding, 

My daughter is 4-years-old and is beginning to ask logical questions about Santa, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and other made-up characters. For example, we were recently reading a book about colorful little forest fairies and she asked if fairies are in “real life.” I said no. Her follow up question was “Is the tooth fairy real?” I felt silly and my answer was illogical, but I said yes. A few weeks later, we were at a birthday party with a visit from the character Elsa. She asked if Elsa was real and I said yes. That week we watched the movie Frozen and she asked if the movie was real. I felt silly and caught in a lie so I said yes. My question is: How do I play along with these fun traditions of childhood but also teach the realities of life? Unicorns and mermaids don’t exist, and we won’t ever be able to find them in real life, but Santa is? I’m doing a terrible job at navigating this, and I feel like a liar. Meanwhile, I am proud to raise a daughter who is logical, thoughtful, and asks good questions. Where is the line? I don’t remember how I myself figured out these differences as a child, but I do remember believing in Santa, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy.

—Where is the line?

The general rule of lies is that you should lie for a reason. Lying to children about Santa is fine if you know what the goal is. Will it delight your child? OK, that’s a good reason. Will it be a helpful tool for instilling in them moral behavior via the “naughty/nice” dichotomy? Good stuff.

Eventually, your child is going to find out that Santa isn’t real, though, and the danger is that they won’t figure that out until they’re so old that it causes them social problems.

Normal children will put it together or learn from their friends in preschool. They’ll call you out on it and you’ll sheepishly admit it and then make them chocolate chip pancakes and everything will be fine.

Many of their friends will be going through the exact same process and they won’t be weird.

But what if your child isn’t normal? What if your child is stupid? What if your child doesn’t put it together until 2nd grade and one day says that Santa is real and everyone in the class points and laughs and someone pours chocolate milk on their head?

That dumb child might never forgive you. They might grow into a dumb adult who is in therapy in their 40s talking about how they haven’t been able to have healthy relationships because their bastard parents didn’t model honesty for them.

It’s a risk!

I think if your child still believes in Santa when they are going into Elementary School you should leave some clues around to help them figure out it’s not real. Leave the computer in the kitchen open to a page about Santa being a lie. Make a lot of noise when you are putting the presents on the tree that year so they wake up. Don’t directly tell them because one of the fun things about the lie is figuring it out, but nudge them along.

There are also some reasons not to lie to your kid about Santa. 

One reason is that it gives them a superpower with their friends. I never believed in these sorts of things because I have a sister who is 18 months older than me and she told me the truth when she found out. Consequently, I was the kid who told everyone else in pre-school that Santa was a lie. It’s fun to have a thing!

You can use that situation to also teach them something: you know a secret but with great power comes great responsibility. Maybe don’t spoil your friends’ fun? 

And it is nice to have a secret! It bonds you together. If all the children in the world believe that Santa is real and your child is the one child whose parent loves and trusts enough to tell the truth, then it will strengthen your bond with your kid. 

But let’s now focus on the real thing that jumps out of this letter: you lied to your kid about Frozen? What lol.

The cartoon? Does your child not understand the concept of fiction? This is a bizarre lie that will backfire in your face.

What is the goal of this lie? There is none. You did it because you’re weak and in the moment you couldn’t tell the truth.

Will it cause them to get teased? 100% it will. And soon.

Is it a common lie that other kids their age will also be sleuthing out? No. The other children will have no empathy in this situation. Your child will have chocolate milk poured on her hair every day for weeks.

Your kid is going to say to one of their friends the next time she sees them that Frozen is real and that friend is going to laugh at her. And if that friend doesn’t laugh at her, when the playdate is over, the friend is going to ask their parent if Frozen is real and that parent, made of sterner stuff than you, will say “what? no. It’s a movie.” And then the friend will laugh and say “I thought so” and be slightly ashamed of even asking. That shame will fester in their heart and they will take it out on your child in the form of teasing.

Your child will come home crying and you’ll have to have a very uncomfortable conversation, and still, she will wonder “what else is my mom lying about?”

You are fucked. It’s probably too late. Because these kids love Frozen and I can’t imagine she hasn’t already said something about this to someone else but if you’re lucky enough that she hasn’t quickly correct yourself and tell her the truth.

Read more

Happy Friday! I am sitting in a bar with my laptop and it is so loud that I have to warn you that this edition of Advice? MUAHAHA. I Am The King Of Advice might have some typos because I’m honestly going to have an aneurism.

Today we’re looking at two questions that were sent to the New York Times Social Q’s column:

I broke things off with the man I’ve been dating for eight months. He is a wonderful person, but we couldn’t make our relationship work. Because of Covid, we quickly decided to date exclusively, and that created an illusion of intimacy that never really existed. My conundrum: I am very drawn to a man my ex introduced me to and with whom he works. (They are both musicians.) I know my interest is reciprocated, but I don’t want to damage their friendship or steal my ex’s joy in making music with his friend. What should I do?

EX-GIRLFRIEND

Musicians, huh? Unless they’re the worst musicians on earth, I doubt you’d be the first person they’ve both slept with.

This is one of those questions that falls into a familiar genre. “I am interested in person X, who I was introduced to by ex-Y. Am I allowed to act on that interest?” And the answer, is in every case, of course..

Let’s assume that your ex isn’t over you and that he is going to be upset if his bandmate starts dating you. You should contact this dude you like and then keep everything quiet. See where it goes! You say the interest is returned and it probably is but you still want to see how it feels when you put the ship to sea. Sometimes a ship looks great in the dock and appears totally seaworthy but then on day 2 of the maiden voyage you decide you hate the ship and the ship hates you and the ship would rather blow its brains out than listen to you prattle on about how hard it was being an only child.

So keep it quiet and see if the spark ignites and then after a couple of romps in the sack, tell Liam Gallagher that you’re fucking Noel. Or let Noel tell him, if he wants.

People love to worry about this scenario because it feeds our narcissism. It lends itself to an almost god-complex sort of view where you control the entire well-being of your ex and only through some noble act of sacrifice (not fucking the bass player) can you do the damned decent thing of keeping your ex’s head above water. The reason we love this scenario is not only because we love thinking of ourselves as all-powerful but because in general, you’re probably a bit apprehensive about fucking this bass player. You don’t know how it will turn out. We aren’t sure about anything when it comes to love and sex. And that is anxiety-producing. And this scenario you’re describing offers you the chance to not risk the hard scary bit of fucking the bass player and finding out he’s not for you and instead exchange that for a feeling of self-satisfaction and righteousness because you are such a good person that you gave up all the sunny, mimosa-stained brunches of a pop song to let your rat-faced ex be happy with his grunge band.

You’ll get to say for years “I could have had it all but I don’t because I was generous and thoughtful.”

Eh.

In reality, your ex needs to get over you. It’s going to be hard no matter what. It might be quick; it might be prolonged. It might happen on a train; it might happen in the rain. He will not like this in a box, he will not like it with a fox.

So stop letting this bullshit be your excuse not to be happy. You can’t make your ex happy. If you could, he wouldn’t be your ex. 

That doesn’t mean you need to be totally deaf to your ex’s feelings. I would probably not make out with his friend at the end of the first few shows you attend as his bandmate’s girl.

But live your life, girl!

It probably isn’t going to work out with this new musician either but relationships individually never have very good odds. Life is about taking all those doomed pulses of passion and hoping that in the aggregate you’ll come out on top and die somewhere other than a ditch, somewhat other than alone.

I have a childhood friend I see once a year. An acquaintance told me she discovered that her husband and my friend have been having an affair for 10 years. She came to me because I am mutual friends with them on Facebook. She was going to confront my friend, but I don’t know where things stand. This left a bad taste in my mouth, and I am not interested in seeing my friend again. When she gets in touch, can I put her off or must I explain myself?

FRIEND

Read more

In today’s edition of I Can Do Advice Columns Better Than The Famous Advice Columnists, I have some bones to pick with not only a letter that was sent to Slate, but with the answer Slate gave them in response.

You can read them in full here. I’m not republishing them in full first because I go through them line by line. But if you think it’s easier to read in full first, have at it.

A few days ago, I was looking through my 14-year-old daughter’s phone. I do this once a week, just to check she’s not being rude or anything.

I recognize that this is legally permissible behavior but your child is going to be screwed up in the head because of you never letting her have any privacy.

14 year olds are—what?—freshman in high school? They are becoming the people they will be. They need space to do that without their parents eavesdropping on every conversation.

When I grew up, texts were barely a thing, but we did have phone calls and we did have emails and if I caught my parents listening in on my phone calls or snooping through my emails I would have a freak out. If then I was told to just get over it, tough tits, I would hate my parents and find every way to rebel and become deeply untrusting. This lack of trust would very likely stay with me down the road after I went off to college and became an adult, and it would imperil my ability to have healthy relationships with people.

Everything seemed okay, but then I suddenly decided I should probably look through her messages, too.

What were you looking at initially if not her messages? I thought the whole point was to see if she was rude? Sounds like maybe you’re just clicking around and aimlessly spying.

I found a WhatsApp chat called ‘Wonderful People Only.’ In the group there were about 60-70 children, all of them about her age.

Snooping through your kid’s messages is screwed up, but going into a private group your child is part of is also an invasion of the other children’s privacy.

Those children have expectations of privacy as well, and again,  I understand it might not be legally enforceable because of the size of the group or any number of other reasons, but it is still morally bad behavior.

If my child were one of those kids in that group and you called me to tell me that my child had done x y z, I might think it important to talk to my kid about it, but I definitely would think it important to tell you to fuck off and keep my child’s name out of your mouth.

I’d never seen this WhatsApp on her phone before, so I scrolled to the top. The chat was created in December, and she was one of the original 20 people to be added.

You’re also now going through the archives of when the group was smaller, which is not helping your case! The one factor that semi-favored your behavior was the vast size of the group. But now you’re reading things that were sent when it was much smaller and the participants had a much greater expectation of privacy.

Also, this is now old stuff! Digging into the old records of a private chat misses a bunch of things that happened between the participants outside of the chat, between the messages. You have no possible way of getting that context.

To start with, the group seemed to revolve around those 20 people (including my daughter) saying extremely rude things about another girl, “Millie.”

People like to talk shit about people behind their backs. It’s a right handed down from God.

I wasn’t happy about this.

Take it up with God!

But then, in January, Millie was added to the chat so she could see what horrible things were being said.

So, first off, adding the Millie person is weird and I’m curious who did that and why, but, no, she could not see all the mean things that were said before she entered the group. That’s not how WhatsApp groups work. The only reason you were able to see those messages is because your daughter was a founding member of the group. People can’t see messages in groups from before they joined.

They called her a spoiled brat, a b***h, a freak, and more. And my daughter was the ringleader. After reading this I immediately sat my daughter down and asked her what the heck was she doing.

Did she say those things before or after Millie joined the group? You make it sound like it was after, but I’m not confident that’s what happened.

If Millie was in the group when mean things were said, then that is potentially bullying. But still only potentially.

If you came home and overheard your daughter in the backyard saying very mean things to one of her friends, who was crying, you’d probably say something.

But what if you came home and overheard your daughter teasing one of her friends, but the friend wasn’t crying? What if teasing was their love language and just how they bonded? Doesn’t sound like that is what is going on with your daughter and Millie, but it is why you generally want the full context of things before deciding how to react.

It begs the question…how did Millie react in the group? Were they fighting? Did she even see them?

And of course you didn’t come home and innocently overhear your daughter. You broke into her phone and went scouring for misdeeds like a sniffer dog in a cell block.

My daughter replied that Millie had been being “extremely rude” to her and the other people in the group since Millie joined the school in November. So these people got together and made a WhatsApp group so they could rant about their frustrations. Apparently it was never intended for Millie to be added.

I’m sorry to get hung up on this but someone added her. Adding her is an important element of this because it is what theoretically elevates “people talking shit behind someone’s back” to “bullying.”

Who added her, why, and what happened after she was present are the key things you can’t skip over.

It’s possible that someone was in the chat and didn’t like the way Millie was being treated and invited her so she could see what was going on (unaware, like you, that people can’t see old group messages), or perhaps hoped that no one would notice Millie had joined the chat so that the next time someone said something bad about her Millie would be able to pop out of the shadows and go “say it to my face!”

Who knows! But it’s important in deciding the nature of your daughter’s act.

Art isn’t art unless you allow an audience to see it, and talking shit isn’t bullying unless the subject is subjected to it.

I asked my daughter to give examples, and my daughter replied that Millie had refused to download social media, didn’t wear trendy clothes and barely used her mobile phone. I explained to my daughter that doing these things was not being “extremely rude” and Millie simply had different interests than her peers. My daughter said that it was wrong for Millie to not be like anyone else. I tried to talk to her, showing her videos about diversity, etc., but they didn’t work.

I’m not buying this version of this conversation. Obviously those examples are not someone being “extremely rude.” Your daughter is 14. She’s been through middle school. She probably knows the difference between an act and a trait. She’s spent 9 years in school and she’s probably met lots of students she doesn’t like for whatever reason. She probably wouldn’t describe those students as rude just because they didn’t hit it off.

My daughter said that it was wrong for Millie to not be like anyone else.

This line just doesn’t sound real in this part of the conversation. “Anyone” else? Not “everyone” else?

It sounds like your daughter is in a popular clique, but the whole thing about cliques is that necessarily there are people who aren’t in them. That’s what gives them structure. The people who are not in your daughter’s clique are not like what she might consider “everyone” else but she isn’t being literal. There are other cliques. This is a fact she is well aware of.

But the first red flag for why I think you’ve become an unreliable narrator is that you say she said “she’s not like anyone else.”

This is not a thing people usually say in an insulting way. If you are unique, you are a rare bird, is how that sort of thing is normally said. (Whereas “not like everyone else” is a pejorative euphemism for some loser who isn’t popular.)

The exception to this would be if they had no arms or something. And if Millie had no arms, this would have come up in the conversation you had with your daughter. Or you’d have read jokes about her armlessness in the WhatsApp group you read.

I went to a school where everyone was very athletic and able-bodied except for two disabled kids in the whole high school. I was one of them. Believe me, when kids want to tease you for being different because of something that actually does make you different, they do it! They call you “one eye.” They don’t dance around it.

Reason 2 I have come to doubt the reliability of your version of events is this:

“I tried to talk to her, showing her videos about diversity, etc.”

Why would you show her videos about diversity? What makes you think any of this is about diversity? You’ve read the WhatsApp chats and you’ve grilled your daughter and this is the first time diversity has come up. How could you possibly know at this point in the story if that has anything to do with it?

“And then I found out that Millie had been invited to our house the following Saturday. I told my daughter that Millie could still come round but if I heard any rude comments she would be leaving.”

Why wouldn’t you have let Millie come around? She’s a bully victim in your mind. Wouldn’t you want the unpopular girl to be invited to the party? And if then people weren’t nice to her, your remedy would be to…make her leave? Hahaha.

Look, kid, I know my kid bullies you but nevertheless I have graciously decided to let her invite you to her party, however, if my daughter decides to be mean to you—even a little—you’re going to have to walk home in the rain.

When Millie came round, I found out that she is Black, bisexual, and transgender.

In life, one thing leads to another. There’s a cause and effect. In your retelling of this story, another led to one thing. You divined out of thin air that diversity was going to be the root cause here.

Conveniently, this ties all of your daughter’s questionable behavior up nicely. Your daughter indeed is allegedly mad at Millie for a trait and not an act. And not just any trait! She’s picking on this girl for three traits which Gen Z has been rightly celebrated for embracing.

I don’t have a problem with any of those things but apparently my daughter does.

So 70 kids in your daughter’s school in 2022 all got together to talk shit about a bi trans woman of color in a private WhatsApp group and no one in that group even once mentioned that she was bi, trans, or a woman of color? If they had, you would have learned that when you went through the chats  and not been surprised when she walked in your house! And if that is true, then it seems to me the only person thinking quite a lot about her sex, gender, or race is you, someone who comes from a generation obsessed with those traits.

I immediately took Millie home.

HAHA WHAT???

You THREW  the girl out because of her sexuality, gender, and race?

And you think that you’re the woke and evolved one?

I’ve confiscated my daughter’s phone but she still makes random comments to me about how “stupid” Millie is. How can I explain to my daughter that this isn’t okay?

She’s probably just doing that because you made a huge deal out of this and now she’s bringing it up a bunch because she’s invested in making you feel remorse for every single thing you’ve done up to now and every single conclusion you’ve jumped to.

If I were your daughter, I would be much more concerned about how stupid my mother was than how stupid this girl in the class is!

I don’t think this whole story is made up. I think the broad strokes probably happened like you say. I think you didn’t know why your daughter didn’t like this random kid you’d never heard of and then you became convinced your daughter was a monster. I think the part where you say you showed your daughter videos about how diversity is good is a false memory, or it happened later on after the party.

I think you refused to take the act of your daughter inviting this girl over to your house as a sign that social dynamics in school are hard and you probably don’t grasp them fully because if she really hated her why extend her an invitation at all? I think you didn’t consider the fact that Millie had been unable to see the old WhatsApp messages and didn’t even know your daughter hated her because if she had known,  why would she accept the invitation?

I think that when she showed up you, an old person, saw a young black trans teen and were like “WOAH” and then, what? You inquired about her sexuality? How did you know she was bi? And then because you’re obsessed with all those things, even if you’re a nice liberal who is obsessed with them in an accepting way because it makes you feel evolved and valiant, you projected that obsession onto your daughter in the negative and decided she was a racist bigot. Then, properly gassed, you whipped yourself into a deeply misguided lather that somehow justified you THROWING OUT THE BULLIED BLACK BISEXUAL TRANS GIRL.

Take a breath, hon.

You have some problems with your daughter that I think you need to get serious about. Your child is 14. She is an idiot. She will make lots of mistakes. But you are an adult and you need to get a grip. Why do you think your daughter is some sort of malevolent force? Did she do something to you? What are you blaming her for?

Is her father still at home? Are you still married? What does he think about this? If not, did she side with him in the divorce and you’ve never forgiven her?

This just has nothing to do with Millie. It has to do with a mother, who I'm going to venture to guess, had a very complicated relationship with her own mom, and a daughter who is right at the precipice of becoming a full on person with their own volition.

This is an advice column. So here is my advice. The first thing you need to do is take a good long look in the mirror.

You shouldn’t have snooped on her phone. You shouldn’t have snooped in the WhatsApp group. You shouldn’t have scrolled all the way back and read the entire WhatsApp. Before concluding that Millie was shown the mean messages, you should have googled how WhatsApp groups work. You shouldn’t have jumped to the conclusion that your daughter was in the Ku Klux Klan. You shouldn’t have asked that poor girl about her sexuality. You shouldn’t have thrown her out of your daughter’s party.

You should have spent the last week focusing on almost anything else.

The second thing you need to do is this: spend some actual quality time with your daughter. Go on a vacation just the two of you. Give yourself enough time so that you can remember what you love about her. Because there are lots of things, I’m sure! She’s yours after-all!

And then when you come back home, try to accept that teenagers need to learn how to navigate complicated social dynamics themselves.  Ease up.

So this is already really long but I would like to now respond to the response Slate gave.

Read more

In today’s edition of “People Sent Questions To Advice Columnists And I Am Answering Them,” we have two letters that were published in the New York Times SocialQ’s column.

Should We Stop Being Friends With A Couple Because They They Yada-Yada’d My Wife?

My spouse and I were invited to a wedding. Actually, I was: The invitation was addressed to Mr. John Doe and Guest. But the bridal couple has known my spouse and me only as a couple, and they’ve been guests in our home many times. My spouse, having been erased from the invitation, views this as a friendship-ender. I do not. Thoughts?

JOHN DOE

Of course, you don’t have a problem with it. They like you more!

Well, they might like you more. 

There are two possibilities:

1. they like you more and your wife needs to get over it because this isn’t some Maoist work farm where everyone starves equally.

2. they didn’t think about this at all and your wife is reading way too much into it. They have lots of invitations to send and they don’t have time to be incredibly hyperconscious about every little idiotic thing one of their loser friends is going to take from it. They probably invited you by name because you’re a man and in the old days of the Oregon Trail or Mad Men, women were just the et al in an invite. So your name was probably on some list because you have a dick and the wedding planner saw the +1 and didn’t know anything about your wife or the deep details of her relationship with this couple and just called her “guest.”

In general, you’d imagine the second one here is more likely—that you and your wife are reading too much into some innocuous nothing—but the fact that your wife thinks this nothing would be a “friendship-ender” makes me think it is actually very possible they just do like you more.

Ending a friendship because of something like this is not a thing people do if they value that friendship. The foundation of friendship is generously interpreting the other’s actions as they pertain to the integrity of the friendship. Indeed, it is the rock on which the church of friendship is built.

Your wife isn’t doing that, and if she doesn’t value the friendship, why should they?

My advice? Tell your wife to grow up and stop making this other couple’s wedding about her, but if she can’t do that and be polite at the reception, she shouldn’t come, and you’ll just use your plus one on someone else.

Why Won’t My Boyfriend Skip Family Vacations To Travel With Me?

Read more

On today’s episode of “I Read Advice Columns And Answer The Questions As Though They Were Sent To Me,” I tackle a question about parenting sent to Slate:

Dear Care and Feeding,

There is a girl in my daughter’s grade that is generally on the periphery of the social scene. During parties, Girl Scouts, and social events, she keeps to herself (whether she wants to or feels she has to, I cannot tell). from what I gather, this has been the way since Kindergarten. We moved to the area last year, and I immediately took a liking to this girl. I felt that her interests and my daughters were similar, so I arranged a playdate. It went wonderfully. However, my daughter has expressed concern that some of the other girls may treat her differently should they learn of the playdate. I replied that I understood her worry, but that a true friend would not do such a thing. She instead should try to focus on how much fun she had and how happy she felt to be with the aforementioned classmate. My question is, how do I explain this to her in an age-appropriate way? I worry she’ll isolate her peer for the sake of appeasing other classmates, and I do not want that for her or this other little girl.

— Can’t We All Get Along 

Slate’s advice is, basically, you did the right thing. You have told your daughter that she needs to be friends with this person despite the fact that she may suffer for it.

OK, sure: loyalty is obviously a virtue and you should not let peer pressure decide your fate. But peer pressure isn’t imaginary. It isn’t a bunch of monsters under the bed that don’t really exist but to be used rhetorically in moral lessons. 

Your daughter has moved to a new town. She seems to be adjusting nicely. 

One day you were at some bake sale and noticed that another child was not an active participant in the social scene. You decided that you liked the child and thought that was unfair. You forced a playdate on your daughter with that child. She dutifully went to the playdate and then reported back that it was fine but she would prefer not to have more playdates in the future. Perhaps that was because this child is unpopular and she doesn’t want to risk her tenuous new relationships by befriending someone unpopular. But perhaps she also just didn’t like her? Maybe she was placating you by saying she loved it. You’re her mother! You intervened and did this. 

This entire exercise is also predicated on your assumption that the unpopular girl is depressed and wants desperately to be part of this social scene. That is not something you should assume. There are many different personality types! Some people aren’t joiners. 

Let’s assume though for the sake of argument that you’re right and your daughter had the best time in the world on this forced playdate with this perfectly nice child who is incredibly depressed because she has been unfairly ostracized from the Girl Scouts and that your daughter doesn’t want to continue the friendship with this leper because she is afraid of social backlash. 

1. That is not an irrational thing to care about. Your daughter is new to this town. She needs to make her own friends.

2. You and your daughter are entering a situation that neither of you has perfect knowledge about. The unpopular girl and the rest of that class have known each other for years. They have a history. You have no idea what that history is. 

When you board an airplane and they read the safety instructions, they tell you to secure your oxygen mask before securing others. I understand that it would be nice of your daughter to go out of her way and befriend this other girl and shout their friendship from the rooftops, but your daughter first needs to secure her own oxygen mask.

You don’t say exactly how old your daughter is but I’m going to assume this is 3rd or 4th-grade drama. 

You need to let her learn social dynamics on her own. That is how people become who they are. They do not learn it because someone told them “this is a value system.” 

Your daughter needs to feel the tension of trade-offs on the playground. She needs to encounter a situation in the cafeteria where her expectation is one thing and then the reality is something else. She needs to be surprised and humbled and guilty and proud and happy. She needs to find these experiences for herself. 

This is a nice way of saying that your daughter probably needs to have a few times where she likes someone in secret, makes the choice to outwardly act as if she hates them for peer pressure reasons, witnesses the consequences of that for someone she secretly is fond of, and feels the guilt of her decisions. 

You are acting as though this is, like, a child bleeding to death on the soccer field and your daughter wants to give her aid and everyone else in the class is saying “let them suffer” and you are telling your daughter, “yes, give her aid. Don’t let her die.”

But that isn’t what’s happening. No one is bleeding out. These are children, who through crosses and losses and happiness and delight, grow into adults.

If someone is bleeding out on a soccer field, parents and medical professionals need to intervene and save them. But you’re not talking about that. You’re talking about the basic social dynamics of any group. Learning how to handle those dynamics is one of the main things you learn growing up.

I don’t know what you do for a living, but you probably have some community at work or a friend group at the hair salon or whatever. You probably don’t like everyone you work with. You probably don’t have the exact same equal feelings for everyone who sits next to you at the hair salon. Every day you make a million little decisions—tradeoffs—about how to handle that delicate balance.

Your daughter will be asked to do that every day for the rest of her life.

Read more

In today’s edition of “I Have Answers To Questions People Asked Famous Advice Columns” we have three letters sent to three different publications.

1) Does My Extended Family Hate My Daughter?

Our first letter today was sent to the NYPost’s Dear Abby column:

DEAR ABBY: Our daughter and her cousin are the same age. Both are medical school graduates. Eight months ago, when this cousin got married at an in-person wedding, he was showered with gifts from the family. My daughter, in contrast, had a private ceremony because of COVID concerns and sent a wedding announcement to the family. To the shock and amazement of my husband, my daughter, and myself, not a single person in the family thought to send her a gift or even a card. 

There’s no bad blood in the family. Everyone appears to love her. She is disappointed and devastated. Should I just get over this, or should I say something to the family? She and her husband live 2,000 miles away, and at this point, I can’t envision them making the effort to fly home and see the family ever again. — BAFFLED IN TEXAS

Dear Baffled In Texas,

Abby’s response is that “the rules of etiquette state that wedding gifts are required if someone is attending a wedding” and that since there was no wedding, no gift was expected.

What is this, Little House On The Prairie?

I have been to lots of weddings. I have given gifts for many of them. It has been probably twenty years since I actually brought that gift to the actual wedding because the registries are online. My physical presence at the wedding has long since stopped having anything to do with the “gift.”

Amazon and the miracle of e-commerce have detached the physical wedding from the wedding gift, and that has had multiple consequences: on the one hand, it makes it more acceptable to attend a wedding and not give a gift at all. You won’t get weird looks. On the other hand, it means you are expected to send gifts on certain occasions even if you don’t attend.

For example: Sometimes I’ve been a plus-one at a wedding and I wasn’t trying to impress my date by showing what a good and interesting gift-giver I was. I didn’t give gifts to the married couple because I didn’t know them and they didn’t know me and none of us would have given one shit if I had spent $15 on some knick-knack just to say I had. 

But I have given gifts to many married people despite not attending their weddings. Sometimes you can’t make it! Indeed, it is fairly standard to send a gift when you actually can’t attend a wedding. It shows that you care, even if you can’t be there.

The logistics of this are not complicated since, again, all of this is done online now. People make registries online and include them in their invitations.

Invitations. This is the key thing that your daughter and Dear Abbie are missing.

The expectation of a gift is not tied to attendance at a wedding. It is tied to receiving an invitation to the wedding. That is the moment when people decide to send a gift.

Your daughter didn’t send any invitations because she didn’t have a wedding. Because of that, no one sent her a gift. This is her fault. Sorry.

She sent “a wedding announcement”? Is that like an Instagram post but printed out and mailed to people? No one is going to send you a gift or even a card because of that. 

You might expect extended family to send her gifts because they’re family but they probably are a bit insulted because your daughter did have a “private ceremony.” A private ceremony implies a couple handful of people. Maybe immediate family (did you attend?) and the closest two friends of the bride and groom, respectively. So potentially 12-20 people.

Well, your daughter just told Aunt Ginny that she doesn’t make that cut. And Aunt Ginny has responded in kind: she isn’t going out of her way to track down postage and mail your selfish daughter a card.

(Your daughter could have avoided this by saying they didn’t have a ceremony at all. That would imply she got married with two witnesses and a justice of the peace, or something. But she didn’t say that. She said she had a very very exclusive ceremony.)

Invitations are nice! They make the person who receives them feel valued! The invited in turn responds to this kind act by sending the inviter a gift. Your daughter did not play her role in this exchange and has no right to complain.

The second she decided to forgo a wedding where she could send invitations to people, she should have accepted that she was not going to get any gifts. All she can hope for are some Instagram likes on the photos.

If she really just wants some gifts then she should have left the door open for a future reception after she wasn’t freaked out about Covid. She could have said that in the announcement. Some nonsense about “getting together to celebrate at a later date.” Then once that date came, you could send an invite, and the gift expectation dance would begin. 

Does all this sound stupid to you? Sort of silly and ridiculous? Well, it is. This is silly and ridiculous. Sometimes people get mad about something that is silly and ridiculous because they don’t want to get mad about what they’re really mad about. 

To zoom out for a second, why is your daughter spending her honeymoon period upset about this? Is it because the marriage isn’t going as well as expected? It seems like there is a chance she is projecting her anxieties and fears about this new marriage onto the loose acquaintances who haven’t sent her Amazon gift cards. 

How much time are you spending with your daughter? Does she, like, call at weird hours? Does she go for long drives just to get out of the house and call you to talk out of earshot of her husband? Do her husband and she seem to be getting along? 

To the extent that this is about the gifts, it is her own fault. But in reality, it seems like the more likely answer is it isn’t about the gifts and your daughter is looking for something else: freedom from the fear that she might have made a mistake. 

But the truth is her extended family can’t buy that for her from an online registry. You can’t give that to her from a FaceTime call 2,000 miles away. Even her husband can’t give that to her, just as she can’t give it to her husband. She has to find it for herself in time. 

2) Do I Have To Let My Coworker Have Sex With My Husband?

Read more

A recent letter to the New York Times Ethicist column brought up the tricky situation of being an adopted child who has uncovered their genetic birth mother through legal research and DNA testing. 

When I was born, 55 years ago, my birth mother decided to deliver me to Catholic Charities so that I could be adopted. I was lucky to be raised by loving and …

Read more

Happy Saturday! The New York Times has an advice column called SocialQ’s which is about how to handle “awkward situations.” The advice doled out is fine but it’s a little staid. I am better at giving advice than this columnist. So here are some answers to three recent reader questions.

Read more

Everett Collection/Shutterstock

A few years ago I was at a party and people began to talk about whether it was OK for people in other countries to use words that in the United States we considered sexist slurs if in those other countries the words have different connotations. Specifically, it was about the C word. Everyone agreed that in the United State…

Read more