Close-up considerations

1. People are reluctant to give you any sympathy about your being ill the moment they suspect you are deceiving them.

2. Men want to show to women that they are more ill than they really are.

3. Women don’t like to be ill themselves.

Unit Eleven

Open-up ideas

1. Advice columns in newspapers perform a valuable social service.

2. The majority of advice columns are completely genuine.

3. The advisory staffs of such columns are all highly qualified people with a considerable breadth of understanding of human problems.

4. Loneliness and unhappiness are the recurrent themes of ‚advice columns‘.

5. It‘s quite possible to write about the problems explicitly in the hope to have a good answer.

6. There‘s something sad about the tendency to laugh at the misfortunes of other people.

Text for discussion

There is one part of women’s magazines that every man reads. It is the section popularly known as the ‘agony column’, where women, and increasingly men, write for advice on what are sometimes referred to as ‘affairs of the heart’. The person who answers these letters usually has a very reassuring sort of name, which suggests a gentle middle-aged lady of great wisdom and experience, but who at the same time is as homely and approachable as your favourite aunt. At one time it used to be widely believed that the letters were in fact all made up by someone on the editorial staff, and that ‘Aunt Mary” who provided the answers was a fat man with a beard who drank like a fish, smoked like a chimney, and was unfaithful to his wife into the bargain. Although this may be true in some cases, the great majority of advice columns are completely genuine, and the advisory staffs are highly-qualified people with a considerable breadth of understanding of human problems.

At one time the letters which were published and answered in full dealt with problems of a very general emotional nature. The recurrent themes were loneliness, unhappiness in marriage, difficulties in bringing up children, and the problems of adolescence, of which these two are typical.

LETTER A.

Dear Katy Brown,

My problem is that I’m terribly shy, I can’t help blushing and stammering when I have to speak to new people. I went to a girl’s school, so I didn’t really have anything to do with boys till I started work. I work in an office, and there is one boy here who’s very nice and friendly with everybody. The trouble is that whenever he speaks to me, I just blush and stay silent: I just daren’t open my mouth. I’d love to get to know him but I just get tense every time he comes up to me. If things go on like this, I’ll never get married, because I’ll never even get to know anyone. What should I do?

LETTER B.

Dear Katy Brown,

I’m a 19-year-old boy. I’ve got a good steady job, a lot of friends, but one big problem – my father. He always insists on knowing where I’m going, who I’m going with and what I’m going to do every time I got out. I have to be home by eleven o’clock during the week, and eleven thirty at the latest on Saturdays and Sundays. To make matters worse he usually waits up for, and makes a terrible fuss if I’m even a few minutes late. The worst thing of all is that he doesn’t treat my sister (she is 21) this way, she is allowed to do whatever she likes, more or less. It just isn’t fair. How can I convince my father that at 19 I’m just as grown-up as my 21-year-old sister?

Occasionally the letters themselves were not published but only the answers, giving rise to such mysterious comments as ‘Do not worry, Miss B of Bed ford, yours is a common problem which will disappear when you are older’, or, ‘Have nothing more to do with this man if he continues to do what you say he does’. Much of the fun in reading them lay in trying to work out what on earth the problem was that led to such peculiar answers.

Nowadays everything is much more explicit, and questions of the most intimate kind are fully dealt with. As the agony columns have become more professional and more frank, a lot of the fun has gone out of them. This is undoubtedly a good thing, because there is something very sad about our tendency to laugh at the misfortunes of our fellow men. For example the advice columns get a lot of letters from people who are genuinely distressed about what they believe to be terrible physical deformities: stammering, acne, bad breath, protruding ears and so on. Others are terrified of meeting people because they suffer from a crippling shyness, or are convinced that they are hopelessly unattractive. There is a joke about a psychiatrist who told a patient: ‘Don’t worry about your inferiority complex, Mr Jones, because you are in fact inferior’. But it is not really funny to be so self-conscious about your appearance or so lacking in self-confidence that you stay in your room instead of going out and meeting people. If they do nothing else, the agony columns let you know that you are not the only one who worries about pimples, or whatever it is that is cramping your social life.

The advisers seem to be on much more dangerous ground when they start to give advice on the most delicate and intimate aspects of human relationships. This is not to doubt either their good intentions or their understanding of human nature. But it is a risky business to advise, say, a married couple on how to save their marriage, when you know about them only what they reveal to you in a short letter. Not only that, but the chances are that you only get one side of the story, because only one of the couple will write to tell you about the shortcomings of the other. It is difficult to know how you can usefully answer such letters as these, for example:

LETTER C

My husband has just announced that he is going to end our seven-year marriage. He says he is absolutely convinced that I have been having a lot of affairs with other men. It simply isn’t true, but he just will not listen to anything I say, and the more I express my innocence, the worse he becomes. I have even suggested that he should ask someone else about it, but he refuses. I am so desperate that I think the only solution is for me to take a ‘lie detector’ test. Can you tell me how I can get such a test?

LETTER D

I am twenty years old and I have been going steady with a boy for more than a year. He is always telling me that he loves me, but whenever we go out, he stares at other girls and says how lovely and sexy they are. Things came to a head the other night: we went out with another couple and he told me he thought the girl was really pretty, and that before he met me he was always trying to date her, but she refused. He spent the whole evening talking to her, so you can imagine how miserable I felt by the time we left. I just don’t know what to do, I’m afraid that if I get angry with him, he’ll leave me, but on the other hand I can’t stand much more of it.

To their credit, the best advisers always make the point that without knowing more, they must limit themselves to general advice, and in some cases will even offer to enter into private correspondence in order to get more information and consequently to give more useful advice. Without doubt they are in their way performing a valuable social service. If they were not, the agony columns would soon dry for lack of interest, and more importantly for lack of confidence.