Lectures by the Dull and Uninformed

There are few things in life more frustrating, at least to me, than being lectured by someone who has incomplete facts and has shown a complete lack of knowledge or even competence in the area upon which they are lecturing me.

I get frustrated when it is my children, who will occasionally try to tell me what some little noise or behavior on the part of my two year old son means… in spite of the fact that he’s the FIRST toddler they have ever experienced and I have dealt with three. More than half the time, they are incorrect. Of the times they have been correct, I have yet to be surprised or informed by what they told me. It’s infuriating to have someone with less information than I do lecture me.

My grandmother used to like to lecture me about my depression. She knew nothing about it, grew up in an era when the term “depression” was nearly unheard of. She didn’t understand biochemical imbalances or other legitimate causes, she was just certain that I just needed to “smile more”. I, by the summer the particular set of conversations I’m referencing occurred, was about thirty and had probably fifteen years of experience dealing with depression and various therapies and anti-depressant medications and other coping strategies. She had a barely working knowledge of the state of the art as of her youth, which is to say she had heard the word “leeches” and presumed she knew how to handle an organ which needed to be replaced via transplant. It’s infuriating to have someone with less information than I do lecture me.

And so tonight, I am extremely angry at someone who has chosen to lecture me about my relationship with my wife.

Now, I will state right off the bat, no relationship is perfect. There are ups and downs, there are the great triumphs and the great battles. You love each other, you do your best to work through the problems, and life goes on. Anyone who tells you that a good relationship has no conflict is deluded or trying to sell you something. I’m not saying Janet and I have any huge problems right now, we don’t. We have the same sorts of little problems every successful marriage goes through periodically.

However, there is a person in whom Janet sometimes confides. This person has not, in her entire life, had a successful, stable or healthy relationship. She is at best a mediocre parent to her single child (born out of wedlock, the product of one in a long string of spectacularly failed relationships). She spends hours talking with Janet about the sorts of social stupidity most teen-aged girls do in high school… but then grow out of by college, and certainly by their 30s.

And yet this person, who has at best shown the same talent for relationships that my grandmother did for quadruple bypass surgery, or my children do for the intricacies of child rearing, took a few details she got from Janet after a minor argument and decided to spin that into a series of e-mails telling me that my relationship with my wife was failing, that I was tearing both my marriage and my wife apart, and that it was all my fault. This woman who can’t keep a relationship going (except for crawling back with her dignity in her hand for sexual liaisons with one or more of her former boyfriends during dry spells) and who does not understand that there’s nothing she could tell me about my relationship with Janet that she and I had not already discussed and come to either an understanding on or at least a plan for how to work on it, thinks it is somehow useful to put her spectacularly idiotic relationship skills into suggestions for me.

It’s really infuriating when morons lecture me.

Liam.