Dear Abby: My fiancée has been secretly seeing a male ‘friend’ behind my back

A guy writes in because his fiancée is sneaking around with a "friend," and honestly, the fact that he has to write in at all tells you most of what you need to know. When you have to build a case file on your own fiancée, something has already broken. Dear Abby's advice was measured, as it usually is, but the whole letter is a small window into something bigger: an awful lot of people are choosing to marry someone they don't actually trust yet, hoping the wedding will fix it. It won't. A ring doesn't cure a gut feeling.

The second letter, about a woman weighing divorce partly over her brother-in-law, is its own mess, but it rhymes with the first one. In-laws, secret friendships, whatever the specifics, the pattern is the same. People are outsourcing decisions about their own marriages to everyone except each other. They'll interrogate phone records before they'll have one honest conversation with the person they're supposed to be building a life with.

None of this is really about advice columns. It's about how casually we've let "communication" become a buzzword instead of a habit. Couples used to be pushed, by family, by church, by community, toward hashing things out face to face before resentment calcified into secrecy. A lot of that scaffolding is gone now, so people sit alone with a laptop and a stranger columnist instead of a mother-in-law or a pastor who'd tell them straight.

We're not knocking Dear Abby. Someone has to catch the people who have nowhere else to bring this stuff. But it's worth noticing how many letters boil down to the same root problem: two people who stopped talking long before anyone started sneaking around.