This week’s Guilty Pleasure is one that I’m a little embarrassed to admit to – Advice Columns.
Dear Abby, Ask Amy, Dear Prudence, Carolyn Hax, Dear Margo…I read them all. It started with Dear Abby and slowly spread from there. It got to the point that when I was working full-time I couldn’t start my day without first reading Dear Abby and Ask Amy, and depending on the day Dear Prudence (it’s not published every day). People at work would talk about not being able to start work without coffee, or checking the sports scores, and I would just kind of mumble. Every now and then someone would walk in on me reading one of the columns and I would sheepishly admit to my little guilty pleasure. More often than the ladies I worked with would admit to reading some sort of advice column too and we would swear each other to secrecy!
English: Dear Abby star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I’ve given it some thought, and I’ve discussed it with those ladies, why do we read them and why are they such a guilty pleasure? One of the biggest reasons is because they make you feel a little better about yourself. I freely admit that my life has been stranger than fiction – I mean it’s the kind of thing where people wouldn’t believe some of this stuff really happened if I didn’t have pictures…and people willing to testify…Even with that, I’m not as screwed up or confused as some of the folks who write in for advice.
I’ve never had an affair I was trying to hide from my boss. I’ve never found out about my boss’s affair and wanted know if I should use the information to blackmail him/her into giving me a promotion. My family isn’t hiding any secrets about adoptions or a sister really being someone’s mom. No one I ever dated ever hit-on one of my parents or my siblings. (The closest I ever came was in high school when a guy who asked me out a few times told me he didn’t want to go out any more while we were in the hall between classes and then immediately asked my sister out. When she told me I tried to be the bigger person and said she should go out with him if she wanted, it wasn’t a big deal – she said, “Eww, NO! He’s crazy if he thinks he can dump you and I would actually go out with him!” I have a pretty cool sister like that.)
Granted, there are some people who really need help. The women in relationships wondering if it’s really abuse if they got hit once. Or if they haven’t been hit at all, they just get told how useless they are and have to report in every five minutes when they go out and aren’t allowed to visit their family any more. The teenagers writing in asking for advice for how to talk parents about being gay. Kids wanting to know how to handle bullies. Parents, children, siblings, wives, husbands and friends worried about alcohol or drug abuse. They need someone who won’t judge and will give them some very real and reasonable advice.
So many columns, so little time! Newspaper vendor, Paddington, London, (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Then there are the kind of crazy letters. They ones where you have to wonder if they’re real. Lately a lot of them have been about weddings. Things along the lines of my friend says I have to dye my hair to match my dress and have my tattoos removed by laser before her wedding two weeks, is that unreasonable? Or – and this is a real letter I read recently – I just got engaged, my future sis-in-law is saving for new breasts and wants us to postpone the wedding until after she saves the money and has the surgery so she looks nice in the pictures. My fiancé hates confrontation and suggested we pay for his sister’s new boobs, I don’t agree – what do you think?
Advice columns are wallet friendly too since so many newspapers can be found free online. Name a topic and there’s an advice column for it: cars, computers, games, photography….Each columnist has their own voice – don’t like one, keep looking you might like the next. Go ahead, check out advice columns. I promise not to tell!
If you have an idea for next week’s Guilty Pleasure – or if you would like to be the special Guest Blogger and write next week’s Guilty Pleasure post, drop me a line here! I would LOVE to hear your ideas. Especially all you Spoonies and Chronic Babes – what are the those little guilty pleasures that make the bad days a little better? Let’s share and help each other!
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- 10 Weird And Wonderful Dear Abby Columns (buzzfeed.com)
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