A woman writes to an advice columnist with a simple problem: her boyfriend of five years says her college friend bullied him in middle school. The answer should be equally simple — believe your partner and keep the two apart. Instead, the columnist running in both the Anchorage Daily News and the Boulder Daily Camera offers a therapeutic word salad about "mosaic of personality" and "clear the air," everything except the one thing that matters.
The letter writer, signing as "Friend or Faux," says her boyfriend called the college friend "a total nightmare" who "made his life miserable." The two men were terse at dinner. The boyfriend said he's "never hanging out with that awful guy again." The college friend brushed it off as a "funny coincidence."
So what does the letter writer do? She doesn't stand with the man she's been with for five years. She starts questioning whether her college friend is "a bad person" — as if her boyfriend's word about his own suffering isn't enough.
The Anchorage Daily News headlined this as a question about "baggage" — soft, euphemistic, as if childhood torment is just emotional luggage to unpack. The Boulder Daily Camera at least called it what it is: a "hostile past." But both ran the same mealy advice from "Eric," who tells the woman to "take your boyfriend's word about his experience" — then immediately suggests she might "bring the mistreatment up with your college friend," so long as she checks with the boyfriend first.
That's not taking his word. That's treating his lived experience as one data point in an open investigation.
Here's the plain truth the columnist won't say: if your partner of five years tells you someone made his life miserable, you believe him. You don't convene a truth commission. You don't wonder if the bully has "changed." Maybe he has. It doesn't matter. Your loyalty is to the man you chose.
But that kind of clear moral reasoning — pick a side, show loyalty, build a life — is exactly what our advice industry can't stomach. It prefers endless processing, air-clearing, fence-mending. Every relationship is a therapy session. Every conflict is a puzzle to manage rather than a choice to make.
The second letter in the same column is telling: an ex-son-in-law with rotting teeth and dental phobia, and a grandmother writing in to ask how to "encourage" him to get help. The columnist's answer? Check if your advice is "welcome and wanted." Heaven forbid someone just tell a man the hard truth that his teeth are driving people away.
This is what passes for wisdom now — not judgment, not backbone, not the willingness to say uncomfortable things to people you care about. Just more management of feelings, more deference to dysfunction.
A country that can't tell its own people to stand by their commitments and face their fears isn't going to stand for much of anything.
