Dear Ann Cannon • I have a dear friend who often vents to me about the burdens of motherhood, etc. As she lists all the chores that weigh on her, creating stress and anxiety on an already stressful life, and then mentions how she’s micromanaging her kids’ lives, I want to take her by the shoulders, shake some sense into her and tell her that she’s taking on additional (and, in my opinion, unnecessary) burdens on behalf of her kids. She doesn’t need to pack the lunch of her 18-year-old son! I’m not a mother myself, so how can I say anything, yet be helpful to her cries for help?
— Frustrated BFF
Dear BFF • Honestly, in my experience, people who vent aren’t really asking you to fix their problems. They’re not even asking for your advice. They just want to … vent. And then after they vent they want to continue to do things the way they’re used to doing them.
So what can you do to help? You can just listen, because I suspect that’s what she wants anyway. However, if listening gets to be too much for YOU and you start feeling like you’ve become your friend’s personal dumping ground, it’s OK for you to step away from her complaints when necessary. Meanwhile, if she does ask for your advice — which I doubt she will — you can gently tell her what you’ve told us here.
Dear Ann Cannon • With the convergence of multilevel marketing companies and social media, I find I am receiving a fairly steady stream of sales pitches from friends online. While I applaud these people for getting into direct sales for products they feel passionate about and can sell part-time from home, I don’t necessarily share their passion. I’m finding that repeated sales pitches and invitations to sales parties for items I don’t want to buy seem to bring an awkwardness to friendships. I am perfectly capable of politely saying “no thanks” to a product or a party, but my question is, does opting out of this type of friends-marketing-to-friends make me a bad friend?
— Doesn’t Want to Be in Your Downline
Dear No Downline for You • Multilevel marketing companies have been around forever, and so have friends who invite friends to parties to promote a particular product. When I was a young mother, I knew people who wanted to sell me Amway. Or Tupperware. I was rarely overwhelmed with invitations in the way that you are, because people had to find a stamp to mail them out in those days. The advent of social media, of course, has changed all that. You’re just always a click away from receiving another invitation, right?
Now. To answer your question. Does declining an invitation make you a bad friend? Um, no. And if someone tells you that you are a bad friend because you didn’t buy something from them, you ought to consider moving out of that downline in more ways than one.
Meanwhile …
Readers responded to last week’s column about DNA testing and male breast cancer. Carolyn Engerman, who works for DNA Diagnostics Center in Ohio, says this: “When these (or any) DNA company do ancestry testing, they compare customer data to their own unique databases. Obviously, then, there are going to be discrepancies in results from company to company. If a company’s report suggests that someone the person always believed to be their biological father actually may not be, that’s a whole different ball of wax. That type of direct-relationship information is not akin to the type of analysis done for ancestry testing and therefore will not vary from company to company.”
And regarding male breast cancer, Cheri Ambrose, the founder of the Male Breast Cancer Coalition (malebreastcancercoalition.org), says this: “Men do get breast cancer, 1 in every 833 men to be exact, so being proactive is wonderful.”
Ann Cannon is The Tribune’s advice columnist. Got a question for Ann? Email her at askann@sltrib.com or visit the Ask Ann Cannon page on Facebook.
