Should an advice columnist advise lying?

It's supposed to be wrong, right?

Original column: Slate’s Dear Prudence, Dec 25, 2024

Happy New Year!

As I’ve said on my “about” page, New Year’s Eve gives me the creeps. It’s too hard to hide from the relentless march of time. You actually watch time tick inexorably toward an outcome you cannot change.

It’s not that you enjoyed the old year, particularly, but you had it, it was yours, and to watch it vanish before your eyes, when there’s nothing you can do about it….

Luckily, everything looks better on New Year’s Day. The countdown is awful, but the new year itself is unsullied and bright with possibilities. So let’s seize one of those and start 2025 with a sharp rebuke to Dear Prudence.

To be fair to Prudie, the letter she tackles in this column is a murky mess. Here’s my recap:

The letter-writer, who says she’s the daughter of two alcoholics, opens with an account of a disastrous family dinner on Christmas Eve nine years ago.

The trouble began when one of her sisters attacked her for “quite a bit of childhood trauma.” The LW doesn’t tell us anything about that trauma, so let your imagination run wild.

The LW responded by pointing the finger at their parents, who first turned on her, then fled the room.

Since then, she’s had minimal contact with her parents, and no contact with her sisters. The LW acknowledges that “no one is blameless, myself included.” She says she’s tried to fix things, “but when everyone has different versions of the truth it’s impossible.”

Now, nine years later, she needs help with her husband and his family, especially his mother. The whole family is excessively concerned with appearances, and they’re judgmental. The LW’s mother-in-law knows about the alcoholism in the LW’s family, and her chaotic childhood, and even about that awful Christmas Eve. Still, her mother-in-law “talk[s] about my family and sisters as though things are picture perfect.”

Anyway, this year, at Thanksgiving, her MIL “went off the rails.” Again, the LW doesn’t tell us why or how. But as a result, the LW told her husband she would not attend Christmas Eve at her in-laws’.

Her problem is that her husband doesn’t know how to explain this. He says he “cannot lie” about her reasons. It’ll never fly. His mother knows too much.

And this—her husband’s refusal to lie—is why this woman wrote to Dear Prudence. She wants to know what they should do.

Anyway, here’s where the slippery quality of this story gets interesting. The LW signs it “It’s Not How It Looks, It’s How It Feels.” In other words, observers should ignore what they see, which might have some claim to objective truth, in favor of her entirely subjective feelings. Or as Groucho Marx had it: Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?

And this is after she’s complained that everyone in her family has different versions of the truth!

Given all this, what’s the worst advice Prudie could possibly offer?

You’re right! And she goes with it! She tells the LW to lie.

And how does Prudie arrive at this advice?

Prudie starts by telling the LW “your priority is to protect your peace,” as if that were obvious. It’s not, though. To cite just one alternative priority, my own people, the Jews, honor something called “shalom bayit.” This means “peace in the house,” and it refers to the myriad occasions and ways spouses defer to each other for the sake of household harmony. Surely this sensible concept can’t be foreign to people of other faiths, or for that matter, to people of no faith.

And on the subject of values we all share, how about the primary importance of the truth? I can’t claim to have canvassed them all, but honesty is a mainstay of just about every ethical system, isn’t it?

That doesn’t mean all people are honest. There will always be some, like Prudie and the LW, who lie. But most people consider this a serious breach. And if life has taught anything to AdviceObsessed, it’s that people who do lie, don’t get this at all. They have no idea what the truth means to people who don’t.

So, because Prudie doesn’t understand this, AdviceObsessed will spell it out: People who don’t lie, don’t like getting lied to. In fact, they hate it.

But I digress. My point is that unless someone has a gun to his head, it’s never necessary to lie, and it’s never, ever right. If the LW doesn’t want to go to dinner on Christmas Eve, all she needs to do is thank her in-laws warmly for the invitation, tell them that this year she can’t make it, then say she hopes everyone has a great time.

Then she needs to hold that line, and she needs to stay warm while she does. This is the wrong place for anger or snark. After all, they invited her! How would she feel if they hadn’t?

And finally, she should hustle to suggest another, different opportunity for all of them to get together. These people are her in-laws, after all, and it doesn’t sound like her husband wants to write them off.

AdviceObsessed has read a lot of advice columns, but the naked effrontery of this one has her dazzled. Prudie actually suggests lies that might work for the LW. “Maybe the flu,” she offers, or Covid: “The only good thing that virus ever gave us is an eternal excuse to get out of stuff.”

Can we agree that columnists shouldn’t counsel people to do wrong? Shouldn’t the job require, at a minimum, a commitment to basic ethics?