"Insensitive Remarks Are Hard To Swallow"

Touchy, touchy, touchy.

Original column, Dear Abby, April 20 2024

My take: The LW and her spouse sometimes invite a particular couple to join them for games and desserts. She bakes something special every time, but her guests invariably ask whether she used a mix. This is “an insult and very hurtful,” and she would deep-six the friendship over it, but her husband plays golf with the other guy. She wants to know why these people do this, and how to get them to stop.

Abby suggests she call the wife and “calmly” ask her why she does this. “Remind her,” writes Abby, “that she knows darn well that you prepare the food you serve them from scratch, and you are puzzled about why she has been implying that you didn't.” Then she suggests the LW drop a snarky remark about her “hours in the kitchen before their visits,” and shift the menu to pizza.

I especially like that word “calmly.”

Abby is recommending candor where it can only harm, and it’s not the first time she’s done so, and she’s not the only one. Confrontation is an advice-column trend. This means once again, it falls to Advice Obsessed to remind everybody that friendships just don’t survive brutal candor. Confrontation is escalation, not resolution.

Confrontation may resolve the immediate problem, in the narrow sense that an irritating behavior stops. But the price of this solution is the friendship. Take this affair of the desserts. The friend to whom the LW appeals will either take umbrage, or apologize insincerely, and say she never meant to imply…

Either way, the friendship will first become very awkward, and soon thereafter, it will peter out. Probably the golf game will end with it.

And really, over what? Again, Advice Obsessed must repeat itself, and point out that it’s a big, nasty world in which many people have very real problems. That being so, it does look really, really trivial to be so concerned about nonsense like did-you-use-a-mix.

And Abby needs to learn to tell to tell her sillier LWs that they don’t know what real problems are.

Chance this letter is fake: Going with not fake.

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