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Why do we love advice columns so much? We are hungry little piggies desperate for rules and guidance | Eleanor Robertson
The expectations around relationships have never been so lax, but what are the new rules?
There’s a lot of information about society in relationship advice writing.
The first thing you can safely deduce doesn’t even come from the content, just the sheer amount of advice columns that are produced: we love it. We are all hungry little advice piggies, desperate for rules and guidance, squealing and oinking with fear and displeasure about the almost total freedom we’ve been given to conduct our affairs.
Contractarianism, which stems from the Hobbesian line of social contract thought, holds that persons are primarily self-interested, and that a rational assessment of the best strategy for attaining the maximisation of their self-interest will lead them to act morally...
After getting back from a trip, a friend of mine learned that her boyfriend had gone to a strip club and gotten a lap dance, which felt like a clear crossing of her boundaries within their relationship. […] After asking her about her relationship rules in their monogamous partnership, I realised that while this was a dilemma needing work, the real issue was that they had never had a conversation about what their boundaries even were.
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