Lay Off My Wife

As is the case with us all, I have a certain quantity of friends and family who seem to enjoy telling me what to do. Some of it is arrogance on their part, some of it is condescension, some of it is meant as honest advice. The particular flavor of advice I'm talking about here, though, is the kind where they just take it as a given that they are the wise, all-knowing ones, handing down life lessons to the unstable wild card kid. I can give you examples:

My co-worker, who is lower in the company than me, is drowning and debt, and constantly provokes the ire of his coworkers in a job he hates, regularly gives me advice on how to do my job, how I should take care of my expenses, and how to get along better with my coworkers.

My friend, who flunked out of college twice before scraping together a degree, and took a job in the bad part of town while living next to an escaped felon who the cops won't pick up because they don't really care who lives in his neighborhood, so he has to sleep with a gun at his door, gives me advice on working hard to succeed and making the right choices in life.

My relative, who is incredibly irritable, has a reputation for being abrasive, and is one of the most closed-minded people I've ever met, gives me advice on how to be popular and loved by people and talks down to me for being difficult and reactionary.

You can always tell the difference between people giving advice and people telling you what to do by how they react when you disagree. People giving you advice will either shrug, or concede the point, or alter their advice to fit your concerns. When you disagree with people telling you what to do, they repeat the same thing again, with an addendum that pooh-poohs what ever genuine concern you might have expressed. If they can't come up with some reason why you're just being naive and combatative, they just huff and say, "well, if you didn't want my 'advice,' you shouldn't have asked." Usually, I didn't ask.

Which is fine. I've met people before. I know how people work. Recently, however, they've pulled a new trick which genuinely pisses me off. Any time I try to rebuke their telling me what to do, or even question an aspect of it, they actually try (and I'm not kidding on this, several people have done this) to tell me that the advice is coming from my fiancee. These are people who have never even MET her.

Perhaps the advice is that I should put aside my money into a savings account. I respond that it makes more sense to pay off my credit cards, because the interest rate is 10x as high as the interest I would make by keeping the money. Their reply is, "well, I think your wife might like to know that you guys have a nest egg."

If the advice is that I should just bare down and keep my shitty job instead of trying to start a respectable career, and I point out that I'm at the glass ceiling in my shitty job, and it doesn't even use my skill set, their reply is, "well, what would your wife think about you planning on quitting your job?"

If the advice is even pertinent to my fiancee... for example, saying that we should spend $6000 on a big wedding in a nice church, and I reply that my fiancee is really shy and she would prefer a small wedding among family, they reply, "well, of course she'll say that to you, because she's trying to be supportive, but I'm sure that's not what she really wants."

Who the fuck do you people think you are? How dare you use the woman I love as a tool, a pawn for your own egotistical fucking needs. You know what? My fiancee wants me to pay off my debt. She wants me to find a new job. She INSISTS that we have a small wedding, even though I want something a little bigger and more involved. What if I were to start making judgements about your wife, based purely on my own selfish views? "Hey, you wanna go see this concert on Friday?" "No, I should stay home and put in some face time at home." "Well, I bet your wife would like to get you out of the house so she can go find someone who can appreciate her. After all, you only appear to see women as frail, nervous housewives from the fifties who just want a white wedding and bazillion children. In the meantime, your wife would probably like someone who has intelligent conversations with her, talks dirty to her, and... oh, I don't know, treats her like a human fucking being."

I'm not going to tell these people to respect their wives, though, because I'm not a presumptuous fucking prick. I stay out of their personal lives.