Weigh-In Wednesday: Advice Column Edition
Shameless opining about things that are none of my business
I always wonder about the inner-workings of advice columns. I read them all the time, and one of the perks of that cheap Washington Post trial I signed up for is the free Carolyn Hax. I really miss regularly getting stuck in the most wild and absurd of Slate's Dear Prudence, but they haven't offered me another good enough deal to re-subscribe, so I only get to scroll through my allotted few melodramas per month these days.
Anyway. One thing I wonder about timeliness. Do time-sensitive questions get any kind of priority, or are the ones chosen with time constraints just have those constraints ignored and they're printed whenever they get around to it, in whichever order they've set up for their newsroom's workflow? A lot of these columnists print more outlandish (or maybe even fake or suspiciously hyperbolic) questions most people can't relate to for obvious reasons ($), so maybe it's a little bit of everything.
Also, how does one even become qualified, in the eyes of the public, to give advice? Some people could get away with saying they're a therapist, or they used to be one, or maybe they studied human psychology and sociology and the humanities a great deal and have a beneficial berth of perspective. But most of these more household-name types would give very different advice for each situation. One might say it's an advantage to have widely differing perspectives give advice to randos on the internet or in a widely-distributed newspaper. Score one for the moral relativists, I guess!
Let’s get into my latest weigh-in about something that’s none of my business: this advice Carolyn Hax gives a hopeful dater looking to find love during the Time of Covid.
Hax's advice in the following column irritates me, because in her abrupt insertion of “— unless there’s some medical reason not to be,” not only does she completely ignore her letter-writer's boundary of “have to be vaccinated,” but she invalidates the entire idea that one can have whichever romantic and sexual preferences they want, as long as they don't hurt others. And while we don't know anything about the letter-writer other than this one dating preference, we do know that there are others who are still, two years after this column was written, vulnerable to Covid and face a much higher risk of serious illness or death if they catch it. Like, it's not even an unreasonable boundary to have, especially back in 2021 when this was written. If the writer is one of these more vulnerable people, she's vulnerable regardless of the reason Random Dude isn't vaccinated. Why would she make exceptions for random Tinder dudes?
In addition to just adding a loophole and exception to the writer’s boundary for no good reason, “— unless there's a medical reason you can't be" also gives a whiff of politicizing something that need not be politicized any further than it already has been. This woman is on a dating app and, for whatever reason, wants to date only vaccinated men. She doesn't need to make exceptions about that or anything else in these brand new, not-even-relationship kinds of introductions. If the woman is indeed screening her potential dating partners in this way to protect her own vulnerable health, Hax is either ignoring her potential literal health needs, or she's implying that vaccination is a moral, rather than medical, decision.
Now, to be clear, for some, vaccination — especially for Covid-19 — is a moral decision, and that deeply annoying phenomenon exists in both/all directions. But here, in this woman’s letter, we have no way to know whether the writer’s preference for vaccinated men is moral or medical, so really, there is no reason to insert a level of preachiness into this scenario that only increasingly irritates everyone. I know this was written more than two years ago, but people were sick of it then, and they’re sick of it now.