On Bad Advice
I went to a party this weekend and was seated next to a very unhappy woman and a relatively happy man. The woman had a great deal of relationship advice for the man. I have been happily married for over two decades, and I am confident in saying that her advice was bad. Finally, she revealed that she was in the middle of a divorce.
Never take relationship advice from people who are not successful in their relationships.
For some reason, people who have recently exited failed relationships, who have never experienced successful relationships, or who are suffering through miserable relationships often offer a great deal of relationship advice for others. Don't take it.
The first time I was pregnant, many people recommended a particular parenting book to me. I looked up the author, and the author was estranged from all of his children. No one needed parenting advice from this person.
Some will argue that people who have failed in relationships are the perfect people to seek advice from because they are the people who know what can go wrong. This, however, is incorrect. Such people often have very little insight into what went wrong. Had they greater insight, they might have been able to correct course. Also, people often feel ashamed of their own contributions to a relationship's failure, and some people deal with this by coming up with stories to tell themselves about why they aren't really to blame. They then share these stories with others.
A perfect example of having little insight into a relationship's failure was a recent, popular article in which the author claimed that his divorce was his fault because he failed to do small chores. Anyone who has been in a successful marriage for any significant length of time knows that marriages don't end because someone forgets pick up his socks or load the dishwasher. That's not how marriage works. This author asserted that his wife saw these small failures as blatant expressions of disrespect and contempt. People who are successful in their relationships know that it is folly to attach great significance to tiny things where significance doesn't exist; this is neurotic behavior.
This author had taken the wrong lesson away from his failed marriage. The problem was not that he sometimes forgot to do small chores. The problem might have been that he didn't make his wife feel valued and loved in other ways. It might have been that they had some irrational thought patterns going on in their marriage that they needed to work through. The problem might have been something completely obvious but left out of or obfuscated by the article. But many people shared his version of what went wrong through links on social media. Notably, most of these people seemed to have also not been successfully married.
Get advice from people who have proven that they know how to do the thing you want advice about it. Do not expect good advice from people who have only failed at it.