Carolyn Hax, March 3 2024: “When do parents tell their kids about Nana’s side piece?”

Carolyn gets part of this right, but the rest she gets so, so, wrong.

Link to the original letter here.

My take: To recap, the LW’S mother-in-law, who’s still married to her father-in-law, is having an affair. The LW’s kids, a three-year-old and a five-month-old, miss her when she’s away with the affairee. The LW wants to know when and how to address this with them.

Carolyn’s answer is that it’s none of the LW’s business, and of course she’s absolutely right about that. She also calls out the LW for saying this is about the kids, who are plainly too young to be a real factor. Probably those kids are just an excuse for the LW’s own desire to intervene. It’s fair for Carolyn to rebuke her for dragging them into it.

But Carolyn also assumes the grandparents have an open marriage (that’s what “it sure seems like”). This–assuming it’s an open marriage, instead of a straight-up betrayal in the classic, sneaking-and-lying-format–is an attempt to normalize open marriage.

Even worse, Carolyn’s MO is to sneer at the LW, as if it’s incredible that anyone still believes all that fidelity crap. You can hear the snark: “Grandparents are sexually autonomous people, too”...”worrying what the dear children will think”...calling the grandparents “Nana and Pop Pop”--it’s all a heavy eye-roll.

In fact, it’s gaslighting. Carolyn, who did so much to establish that term, ought to be more careful not to be guilty of it.

Yes, some marriages need to end. And yes, the grandmother can do whatever she wants; it’s a free country. No, no one should invade her privacy or harass her for her choices; that’s bad manners.

But when a marriage is hitting the rocks, there are considerate ways to proceed, which preserve a measure of the existing spouse’s dignity, and then there’s infidelity, whether open or not. And if a LW wants to express dismay about a relative’s infidelity, in the anonymity of an advice column, she shouldn’t get treated like an idiot or a freak. In fact, she’s neither stupid nor alone.

Chance this letter is fake: Unfortunately I figure it’s real.