An ode to the aunt

Today’s advice columns sit as threads on Reddit and Twitter, where the most popular are AITA (Am I The Ass***e?) and Can You Believe It?, or they lurk amid the chaos of the comments sections beneath Youtube confessional videos. Answers flow in instantly and the platforms are open 24x7, but the crowd-sourced responses are filled with inanity, whataboutery, unhelpful personal tales and tangents designed to entertain rather than assist.

The golden age is over. The agony aunt is fading away. This is an ode to the stern, fair, illuminating voices that guided.

Did you know that the first agony aunts were uncles? In 1691, an English publisher named John Dunton launched the Athenian Gazette. The advice column in that literary periodical is said to have been born out of Dunton’s own unhappiness — he was having an affair and had no one he could turn to for advice without revealing his identity.

He used the question-and-answer format. Questions came in from readers on subjects that ranged from religion to philosophy to relationships. They were answered by Dunton and some of his high-society friends.

It would be another 200 years before the boom in print publications. But by the early 1900s, the advice column was everywhere — in newspapers and magazines for men, women, homemakers and social climbers. They were an interactive element guaranteed to draw in readers, and they were easy to churn out. You didn’t have to be an expert to be an agony aunt or uncle (although that has certainly helped — India, for instance, had the sexologist Mahinder Watsa, who wrote a much-loved advice column right until his death in December, aged 96).

As with Watsa, the best advice columnists were wise and witty whip crackers who told you what you needed to hear. They were usually society women, straight-talking, compassionate, with a bag full of cautionary tales drawn from their lives, friend’s lives and their imaginations. She is “a purveyor of common sense,” writes Irma Kurtz, in her book My Life in Agony, who did the job for four decades for Cosmopolitan magazine (starting in 1972). They had to be great writers too, packing humour, wit, anecdote and advice into a few paragraphs.

By the mid-1900s, in a world where the pace of change was accelerating, the agony aunt offered words of gentle advice for the homemaker struggling in a nuclear family, helped the typist and secretary navigate wardrobes and lunch table politics. Back issues offer a fascinating keyhole glimpse of contemporary life, often still relatable, usually eye-opening in both the variety of problems people wrote in about and the universal nature of the questions they were really asking: Do they like me? Am I doing okay? Have I made the right choice?

You can watch as social markers change in the tone of the questions and answers. By the early 2000s, Slate’s Dear Prudence and the Ask Polly column in New York Magazine’s The Cut were replying in truth bombs peppered with profanity. “I want to be an artist but find that it’s too pretentious,” one reader wrote in 2016. Heather Havrilesky (Ask Polly) replied: “There is the artist, and then there’s this pragmatic person within you who bails you out when you’re drowning. Don’t let the artist f*** with what the pragmatist is trying to do. But do let the artist take up a lot of space. Let the artist call herself an artist, even to her parents’ skeptical friends.”

“I’m pretending to be happy single, but I’m not,” wrote another. “Stop faking happiness,” Polly replied. “Be a malevolent spinster tornado instead, one that’s spilling with rage and frustration… Bridget Jones, but industrious and pushy and unresolved.”

In India, the golden age of the advice column was the ’80s and ’90s, with offerings such as Pearl Padamsee’s Home Truths in Femina, Priya’s Helpline by actress Priya Tendulkar, and socialite Bina Ramani’s Personal column for the Asian Age. The letters that poured in were filled with angst about issues that ranged from acne to that all-time favourite, unrequited love; the surprisingly common trope of the sexless marriage; the always-disturbing “how do I deal with my abusive boss”; heartbroken letters about job hunts; interfering parents; worries about unplanned pregnancies; and the everpresent “I thought he loved me but he won’t return my calls”.

In India, where sex is still not spoken of across the generational divide, these columns, written in a time before the internet, filled a vital need for information. The agony aunts and experts like Watsa were the only sex education available to entire generations of young women and men. “Nothing was off-limits, and the absence of judgement and cover of anonymity made the agony aunt more accessible than a friend or relative,” says psychologist and marriage and family counsellor Nisha Khanna.

For the reader, the advice column offered a riveting look into the deepest fears of random strangers, and a chance to see how other people’s minds worked. It was comforting to see how many worried that their friends were talking about them behind their backs; enlightening to watch as a question that started: “I wanted more gifts at my wedding” turned into an exploration of feelings of inadequacy stemming from an insecure childhood.

“The act of writing without any feelings of embarrassment itself was cathartic to some and that’s why the columns endured,” Khanna says. In two paragraphs, some stern advice was given, something you knew all along revealed in a matter-of-fact way. You don’t see that on AITA.