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People Don’t Want Your Advice

Not unless they’ve asked for it. How to stop giving it.

Niki Marinis
5 min readOct 3, 2021
Katie Dutch — used with permission

I’m the queen of unsolicited advice. How did I earn this unenviable title?

Well, it’s a carefully crafted method of assuming that if you’re talking to me about your love life, you want my opinion on everything you’re doing wrong.

Oops!

You’ll be shocked to hear that it often falls on deaf ears. Why ever could that be?

Because they weren’t asking for my advice!

We all have that friend or family member who tries to fix everything for us. You can’t mention your knee giving you trouble without them telling you what supplement to take, article to read, and doctor to see.

Mention a recipe you were thinking of trying and they’ll tell you what ingredients you should really use and the cookware you simply HAVE to buy in order to make it perfect. Because don’t you want it to be perfect? Don’t you?!

Do unsolicited advice-givers want to help or control?

Eh, a little bit of both. We mean well! We don’t want to see our loved ones hurting and if we know something that will help them we want to share it.

We also want to stop our pain caused by hearing you complain when you keep making the…

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Niki Marinis
Niki Marinis

Written by Niki Marinis

Weird Girl, thrift store owl collector, heartbreaker, lush, aspiring adult. IG: DocJohnnyFever nikimarinis@gmail.com https://nikimarinis.medium.com/subscribe

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