I'm linking to this Carolyn Hax column partly because the first letter is from "Frustrated in Indiana," which shouldn't surprise anybody; there's a lot of seething resentment out there in sexually dysfunctuional Hoosierland. But I also really like Hax's columns. The advice column was a tired, worn-out format until she came along with a fresh perspective and bushels of common sense. Much of her advice is downright Taoist, the "accept the essential nature of things" philosophy I've long tried to practice.
Here's the core of her advice to Frustrated, etc., who wants to tell a smug woman in town that she knows all about the affair she had with her husband: "A good woman will already feel terrible without your help, and a bad one won't feel terrible even with it." And this is her reply to "California" in the second letter, who is upset that her boyfriend isn't changing as fast as he promised he would: "He is who he is. Stay or go."
Many of the advice-column practitioners are still trying, rather pathetically, to recapture the glory days of Dear Abby and Ann Landers. But Hax is charting new territory. She is doing for advice columns what Miss Manners, with her healthy portions of humor, did for etiquette columns some years ago.
