The trouble with advice

When a woman has an issue, she consults her girlfriends. And girlfriends can be pretty opinionated unless you let them know you’ re not NOT asking them to fix it. All you want is a sounding board, someone to let you talk freely of the pros and cons, the what ifs, the fears and frets, so you can move on with it and make your own bad decision you’ll live to regret.

But you know friends. They’re chewing their lips and veins are bulging out of their necks and foam is escaping from their mouths because they’re desperate to solve your problem so they don’t have to solve one of their own.

Wouldn’t it be nice to let them have a go at it? Just this once, like a summer vacation from yourself, let someone else make the phone call, sign on the dotted line, book the plane ticket, go buy you a house, go get you a husband?

People love helping people make decisions; that’s what the experts say. But there’s a catch. They want to be advisors, not deciders. Like the difference between getting on a plane and dropping someone off at departures.

I’m looking for someone to come along for the flight.

So after weeks of debating, I try to take the advice further. East, south, west, Mars, I don’t care. “Just tell me what to do,” I yell, “I’ve given up the fight.”

I ask 18 people. That’s an exaggeration. Not the number but the fact that I decided anything. I didn’t. It was just that the first 17 people didn’t have the faintest idea what they were talking about so I added one more.

That person didn’t know what she was talking about either but it felt like a solid round number.

I also ask 18 people because I want consensus; I don’t want resentment should I follow one person’s crummy advice. I’m protecting my friends and the new acquaintances that happen to be standing at the deli counter while I grab lunch.

Not that I’m lunching, I’m launching. Takeout is a good place to find people with no handy response to “Pardon me, got an hour?”

Problem with sounding boards is they crack midway through your “yeah buts” and “easy for you to says.” Even when you ask them to decide straight-out, “Tell me what to do and I’ll do it!” they act like you’re violating that old adage, “You can’t put your head on someone else’s shoulders.”

I don’t want the whole head, just the couple of brain cells I’m missing.

Finally, with no one willing to take my life in their hands, I come to this: I decide to give them all another chance but not burden the same person more than twice, or at least not three times or four.

Not that I’ll need to because soon the decision will kill me.

I mean why do the hard questions like whether to buy the 2-inch heels in both black and beige seem easier than the frivolous ones?

You may be curious what I was deciding. Something about going somewhere for myself or somewhere else with a relative. I was trying to do both, which is great so long as you don’t need that head in both places.

So I call the first person on the list to reconsider the options. By then I figure she will have forgotten the whole sordid thing because she has a life. But I’m wrong. Before I even launch, she screams, “Just do it or don’t do it. Will it really matter 10 years from now?”

Hmmm . . . I’ll have to get back to you on that one.