Not having lived in a closet for all of your life makes you competent to answer relationship questions. We all have relationships, starting with whoever brings us up and moving on to siblings and friends and special friends and dates and lovers and spouses and so on. There are so many different kinds of relationships and they are all analogous.
Humans are tribal and social animals. Relationships are probably the most important advantage we have in assuring our survival. We can all reflect on the relationships we have experienced and we can all share those experiences.
Right and wrong have little to do with it since relationships are so complex and no one relationship is exactly like any other.Therefore, we are all equally at sea in helping anyone else. Each situation is unique and all we can do is try to reason from our own experience.
Better yet, we don’t try to reason. We merely relate experience and let the OP make of this information what they will. Most of us don’t like to be told what to do, anyway. We want respect. We want sympathy. We might want a little advice, but it should be rendered in a palatable way.
So the best thing to do when you have a relationship problem is to ask for other people’s stories. Get them to describe their experience. If done well, the stories will be entertaining in their own right. If done really well, they might actually have some wisdom that helps us sort out our own situations.
Generally, when I answer a relationship question, I try to spend a good deal of time talking about my own experience. I try, but usually fail to avoid offering advice. It’s too tempting to tell someone what to do. But I hate to be told what to do, and I reason that most others are the same. They want respect, not condescension.
Providing my experience allows the OP to decide whether I have any relevant experience. And even if the OP doesn’t think so, other readers might find my experience to be relevant. Providing my experience gives us common ground. Then I can say what I learned from it. This allows people to see the lessons I have drawn, and I think it helps them draw their own lessons.
I think my main qualification for relationship advice is that I use this method. I try not to advise. I try to share. I’m good at telling stories. This makes it easier for people to see whether there’s anything in my story for them, or not. Other than that, I am not a particularly wise person, unless trying to avoid offering advice is a wise thing to do. Probably not, since I am an utter failure at refraining from offering advice. Maybe one out of twenty times I can do it.
But the competition here isn’t that stiff. Most people try to advise. So it’s easy to be different. Most people don’t share my theory. Or if they do, they are as bad as I am at following it.
So most people are competent to answer relationship questions. I’m not sure how many do it as well as they could because I think people misunderstand what others want. But I could be wrong about that. I guess the proof is in the pudding—the responses one gets and the appreciation one gets. Those are things that can’t really be compared, so there’s no way of knowing, for sure, whether anyone is providing more useful answers than anyone else. It probably doesn’t matter. So long as we have fun answering, it seems to me it is a good thing.
