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Second Opinion: Ask Amy Edition
Jan. 13th, 2013 01:49 amI read a lot of advice columns, including and perhaps especially the ones that give what I think is terrible advice. I guess it's my equivalent of rubbernecking at a car accident. I like to think they keep me in touch with social norms and give me a window into the concerns of people very different from me.
This makes its way into conversation often enough that my sister thinks I should start an advice column for advice columnists, called "Second Opinion," in which I analyse their biases and offer counterpoint responses, but this imagines I have time to take on another whimsical and unending unpaid project. But just this one time, I'm going to offer a Second Opinion(tm).
Currently, one of the syndicated columns the Globe runs is "Ask Amy." It replaced "Annie's Mailbox," in which Annie responded to almost every letter with "well, I think you should talk to a counselor about this." It's hard not to improve on an advice column whose advice is typically "I don't feel qualified to give advice." Yet the improvement is minimal, because Amy's approach (both stated and practiced) is to take the side of the letter writer. Thus, the kind of people who write in to her often begin their letters with "everybody tells me that I'm wrong," because they've got easily an 80% chance that she'll say "well, I think you're doing everything right."
The "Ask Amy" column on Friday opened with a ranty letter from a group of middle-aged married women talking about how their husbands have let themselves go physically but then tease the women for having low libidos. Amy's response begins:
She then tosses in a Fifty Shades of Grey reference to show she's hip. But back to the quote --
Hands up, advice column readers who have seen this exact same complaint over and over again, with the genders reversed -- husband not attracted to wife any more because she's gained weight and doesn't wear makeup anymore and is sloppy all the time because of her interactions with the children. Everybody? Good. Bonus question: What's the inevitable advice?
Answer: That married women feel safe when they can relax and not worry about their looks, but men feel valued when they see their partner making an effort to stay sexually attractive, and this male/female divide brings them into conflict.
Ask Amy, these can't both be true. Men and women can't both be on both sides of a gender divide.
As it happens, this has nothing to do with gender, and everything to do with game theory. We would each ideally like to be loved unconditionally -- to have a partner who thinks we are attractive and wonderful no matter what, no matter whether we're yelling at them or covered in snot. We would also each like to have a smoking-hot sex partner whom we are effortlessly attracted to. Both people in a relationship have these twin desires, and they are as perfectly reasonable as they are in competition.
In most healthy relationships, it works out to a draw, and both partners maintain themselves at a similar level. Healthy counterexamples usually involve compensating counter-inequalities (rich husband and trophy wife), temporary or unplanned alterations to appearance (pregnancy or illness), or cultural distortions that counterbalance the push and pull of the partnership. (Often this is tied to advertising or religion, and shared across a peer group. We not only want our partners to look like us: we want our friends to look like "our sort of people.")
What I would suggest to the book group ladies: recognize the negotiation going on here. Your husbands already realize you're not having sex with them, and the fact that they tease you about it rather than trying to seduce you means they have a pretty good sense their attractiveness level is not up to snuff. They hope it is. They hope that you'll tell them they're beautiful and make passionate love to them. But they know you're not going to, so they make sure that when they tell you they're still attracted to you, it's couched in a joke.
You can work with this. You don't need to persuade them to clean themselves up: you need to tell them which parts, and reassure them that you do still have a sex drive that can be activated. Remember this is still a negotiation; if you go on the attack, your own attractiveness drops, and with it your leverage, plus you presumably want your partners to get out of this with a measure of confidence, since confidence is usually a turn-on. As befits game theory, this is a competition you win by playing to a draw. (For this reason, you are not going to get them to become more attractive than you are. Stay realistic.) It sounds like you'll be fighting against those cultural distortions I mentioned, but since you'll all be doing it together, you may be able to form a counterculture.
There's one more thing you're going to need to do: leave the past in the past. When it comes to unattractive behavior, you can't unsee what you've seen, but what you can do is choose which eyes you look with now. If your husband agrees to stop picking his nose in front of you, but you still can't look at him without imagining it, that's your brain doing that -- your brain. Stop it. Replace it with a memory of him doing something you admire. If you can't -- if you really can't look at your husband without hallucinating nose picking -- well, Annie's Mailbox and I think you should talk to a counselor.
This makes its way into conversation often enough that my sister thinks I should start an advice column for advice columnists, called "Second Opinion," in which I analyse their biases and offer counterpoint responses, but this imagines I have time to take on another whimsical and unending unpaid project. But just this one time, I'm going to offer a Second Opinion(tm).
Currently, one of the syndicated columns the Globe runs is "Ask Amy." It replaced "Annie's Mailbox," in which Annie responded to almost every letter with "well, I think you should talk to a counselor about this." It's hard not to improve on an advice column whose advice is typically "I don't feel qualified to give advice." Yet the improvement is minimal, because Amy's approach (both stated and practiced) is to take the side of the letter writer. Thus, the kind of people who write in to her often begin their letters with "everybody tells me that I'm wrong," because they've got easily an 80% chance that she'll say "well, I think you're doing everything right."
The "Ask Amy" column on Friday opened with a ranty letter from a group of middle-aged married women talking about how their husbands have let themselves go physically but then tease the women for having low libidos. Amy's response begins:
Dear Ladies: The simple version of what's going on is the male/female divide of how each gender tends to view marriage. For men, being happily married means they can truly go native. Your husbands know you love them. Women, on the other hand, feel cherished when they see their partner making an effort. This makes them feel secure.
She then tosses in a Fifty Shades of Grey reference to show she's hip. But back to the quote --
Hands up, advice column readers who have seen this exact same complaint over and over again, with the genders reversed -- husband not attracted to wife any more because she's gained weight and doesn't wear makeup anymore and is sloppy all the time because of her interactions with the children. Everybody? Good. Bonus question: What's the inevitable advice?
Answer: That married women feel safe when they can relax and not worry about their looks, but men feel valued when they see their partner making an effort to stay sexually attractive, and this male/female divide brings them into conflict.
Ask Amy, these can't both be true. Men and women can't both be on both sides of a gender divide.
As it happens, this has nothing to do with gender, and everything to do with game theory. We would each ideally like to be loved unconditionally -- to have a partner who thinks we are attractive and wonderful no matter what, no matter whether we're yelling at them or covered in snot. We would also each like to have a smoking-hot sex partner whom we are effortlessly attracted to. Both people in a relationship have these twin desires, and they are as perfectly reasonable as they are in competition.
In most healthy relationships, it works out to a draw, and both partners maintain themselves at a similar level. Healthy counterexamples usually involve compensating counter-inequalities (rich husband and trophy wife), temporary or unplanned alterations to appearance (pregnancy or illness), or cultural distortions that counterbalance the push and pull of the partnership. (Often this is tied to advertising or religion, and shared across a peer group. We not only want our partners to look like us: we want our friends to look like "our sort of people.")
What I would suggest to the book group ladies: recognize the negotiation going on here. Your husbands already realize you're not having sex with them, and the fact that they tease you about it rather than trying to seduce you means they have a pretty good sense their attractiveness level is not up to snuff. They hope it is. They hope that you'll tell them they're beautiful and make passionate love to them. But they know you're not going to, so they make sure that when they tell you they're still attracted to you, it's couched in a joke.
You can work with this. You don't need to persuade them to clean themselves up: you need to tell them which parts, and reassure them that you do still have a sex drive that can be activated. Remember this is still a negotiation; if you go on the attack, your own attractiveness drops, and with it your leverage, plus you presumably want your partners to get out of this with a measure of confidence, since confidence is usually a turn-on. As befits game theory, this is a competition you win by playing to a draw. (For this reason, you are not going to get them to become more attractive than you are. Stay realistic.) It sounds like you'll be fighting against those cultural distortions I mentioned, but since you'll all be doing it together, you may be able to form a counterculture.
There's one more thing you're going to need to do: leave the past in the past. When it comes to unattractive behavior, you can't unsee what you've seen, but what you can do is choose which eyes you look with now. If your husband agrees to stop picking his nose in front of you, but you still can't look at him without imagining it, that's your brain doing that -- your brain. Stop it. Replace it with a memory of him doing something you admire. If you can't -- if you really can't look at your husband without hallucinating nose picking -- well, Annie's Mailbox and I think you should talk to a counselor.
