Condescending Advice

Unsolicited advice is the worst advice

Yesterday, I posted a very personal note about my struggles with perimenopause.

Today, women are coming out of the woodwork with advice I did not ask for.

These women providing advice are always in the medical or health profession and because of that assume they can tell other women what is good for them. There is no listening or even trying to understand more details to give real targeted advice. No, they immediately go to the shelf of obnoxious information and pull out what they believe is wisdom.

You need to eat better.

You need to sleep better.

Stop running.

Don’t drink smoothies.

Get a health coach.

Drink more water.

The advice I was given unsolicitedly, this morning, feels condescending. These women do not know much of me at all. Yet, they feel they can judge my way of life. They claim to be health professionals, but fail to understand what it does to a person who just showed herself very vulnerable by admitting she is struggling to much of the rest of the world.

What I and I would assume most women do not want to hear is that they need to give up the things they love. “You should stop running”, is not helpful. Telling someone to not drink smoothies, when this person has never touched a smoothie in her life feels like a gut punch of someone not listening and just giving hollow advice. Meaningless words thrown at you.

It is strangely always women doing this. Men give better advice often without judgment. Female advice too often includes judgement. The underlying tone always assumes there is something wrong with what is done today. It is never truly sympathetic advice. It is always advice from a high horse or a pedestal. Always looking down.

Women do not seem to be able to approach strangers from an eye to eye perspective. They always assume there is only one way to life and that is their way. It shows you that true empathy is incredibly rare and that most women perform empathy instead. There is a difference between someone stating: “What helped me is to drink more water” compared to “You should drink more water”. Most women do not seem to understand the difference and approach every conversation about personal struggles with a ‘you should’ perspective.

This approach immediately puts the receiver of that message on the defense. Once you are on the defense all prior negative feelings about yourself get amplified. If someone tells you to just give up the things you love, all it does is to spiral yourself in a depressive state. Again, there is a difference in stating something from an empathetic perspective compared to a ‘you should’ perspective.

“You should stop running” really triggered me this morning. For two reasons. I love running. It is not a sport to me, but a way to explore my surroundings. Whereever I go on vacation, I run. It is also a stress relief from hard work and something I can do even after I worked a 12h day. My social life is being part of a run club, I do not have many friends beyond that. Advice like this feels like suggesting a divorce. It is bad advice when you do not know my personal circumstances. Some women suggested to walk instead. Guess what, I have a dog, I do walk several miles each day anyways. Again, advice without knowing details. You cannot give advice when you do not know the person well enough and it should never be done without being solicited.

There was a should sentence that was reasonable. By the way.

An empathetic approach would state a personal experience or anecdote or simply a question. Sometimes just listening to someone venting is the best option. Not every whining requires a solution. Isn’t that what men used to be accused off? That they offer solutions when the women just wants to be listened to? In my experience, women are the worst at offering solutions to other women.

I sometimes think that women approach life in general like this. They assume there is a right and there is a wrong. They pick what they believe is the right way and build their entire universe around it. Women can not deal with ambiguity, grey spaces, and nuance well. I see it at work. Uncertainty makes women deeply uncomfortable. This is why I believe women log onto perceived facts and sell them as the only truth so easily. And then of course the years of feminist indoctrination has allowed so many women to assume activism against the perceived enemy “white men” as their moral obligation.

The type of women giving you unsolicited and uninformed advice about how you should run your life are the ones that become dietitians, health coaches, therapists, maybe teachers, and “educators”. They make their need to broadcast their worldview not just a personal preference, but a job. What they forget is the most important aspect: how to be a friend.

And… this, my fellow women, is what most women like me are looking for: Friends. Someone to suffer with through these stages of life. Someone to laugh with about the irony of it. That is all.

So my apologies for airing out personal grievances this morning.

Thank you for listening.

I hope I am not the only one feeling this way about unsolicited advice.