The Advice Column Paradox

I didn’t invent this term, but I think it’s a really excellent one, so I’m going to share it here. If you have an earlier citation for the use of this phrase, please leave it in the comments!

The Advice Column Paradox: nobody writes into an advice column when things are going well.

The Advice Column Paradox: nobody writes into an advice column when things are going well. When we vent to our friends about our marriages, but don’t share the positive things, they may think things are worse than they are; but sometimes, there just aren’t positive things. (It’s why I always took pains to say “There’s good stuff too, I just don’t need help processing THAT” whenever we had these discussions. I try to be self-aware at least a little bit.)

It is very common to see, on Internet advice boards like r/relationships or r/AmITheAsshole, people complaining in the commenters always jump straight to “omg, divorce!” But what those people miss, I think, is the core of this paradox. If you are writing in to an Internet advice column, it is because something has gone wrong. Something may have gone so very wrong that they are writing in to an anonymous forum to ask for help. There is a strong possibility that they feel ashamed or afraid to ask the other people in their lives for help. The people who say “Modern couples are too quick to divorce” are either not saying that in good faith, or are ignorant of the fact of the Paradox. I don’t have a snappy name for this one; maybe we can call it the “Why So Much Divorce Corollary” or something.

Ultimately, this paradox and the corollary of people being confused by it is an example of selection bias. “You Should Break Up” being given as relationship advice is not overly common, percentage-wise; if half the advice column responses are “Break up!” and 1 in 100 people are writing into an advice column in the first place, then only half a percent of relationships are getting the “you should break up” advice. If you scale that out into the real numbers, it’s even smaller.

So, no: Advice column readers are not “too hasty” to tell people to divorce. And our culture is not somehow “devaluing” marriage by telling someone who is locked out of a bathroom while pregnant, or worse, that they need to leave to protect themself.