If she tracks him 24/7, will she feel better?

Does everyone live like this?

Original column, Ask Alanna, December 13 2024

AdviceObsessed has been watching, with interest, the new advice column Ask Ilanna. As of now Alanna’s only published four columns, so it’s early days, but so far she seems compassionate and sensible.

This is unusual! I’m cautiously optimistic!

Let’s take a look at the second Ask Ilanna column.

The letter Alanna answers here is about location apps. The letter-writer asked her boyfriend if she could use one to keep track of his movements. She only wants to use it “for casual stuff like knowing when to start making dinner and seeing if they’ve left work.”

A lot of her friends are doing this, but her boyfriend said no. He said nobody needs to know where he is, every minute. So now the LW worries he’s hiding something. “None of my friends’ partners care,” she writes. “Why does he?”

Alanna reassures the LW that even if her friends’ partners don’t mind, plenty of other people would. The boyfriend isn’t an outlier. His position doesn’t mark him as suspect.

Then Alanna adds, tactfully, that the LW’s worry about this suggests that “even without the location tracker—perhaps your trust with one another isn’t quite where it needs to be.”

Is the boyfriend doing anything else that seems fishy? If so, then the LW needs to talk to him, and assess his response. If he’s not, the LW needs to have a talk with herself. “If you’re happy and in love,” Alanna writes, “do you need to do what your friends are doing?

Good advice, right? AdviceObsessed would add only this, but it’s important: It’s neither ordinary nor inevitable for a woman to have to wonder whether the man she loves is cheating. There are plenty of women who never worry about this at all.

What’s their secret? They’ve attached themselves to men about whom infidelity is unimaginable. Suspicion just never comes up.

This means the LW shouldn’t only ask herself whether her boyfriend is cheating now. She should ask if he’s the kind of man who ever would.

Can a woman get this wrong? Can someone like the LW just know her love object would never cheat, and wind up betrayed?

Of course. But that doesn’t mean such men don’t exist. To test this, the LW just needs to consider the men she herself knows. She should draw a wide circle, including not only her friends, but her teachers, mentors, relatives, already-marrieds, men way older than herself—all of them, in other words.

Somewhere in there will be a man of whom she’ll say: Him? No. It’s impossible.

Then she needs to look for a man like that.

Some columnists try to normalize infidelity, as if it’s something that’s destined to happen to all of us, for which we should preemptively toughen ourselves up (looking at you, Carolyn Hax).

But Ask Ilanna isn’t doing that. This is the first of her columns to appear in AdviceObsessed, but it won’t be the last—watch this space.