Do you still remember those days when you bought a magazine just to get advice from an aunt whom you had never meet, but who nevertheless still gave you spot-on advice?
Advice ranged from how to deal with the crush you had on that boy in class, the fright you had over getting pimples on your face and the urge to have sex against all the consequences of what might happen afterwards.
Yep, those where the good old days of agony aunts.
I never really quite understood why they were prefixed with the word ‘agony’, but I guess it had something to do with the intense anguish and emotional pain of the different ‘nieces and nephews’ who always had a question or two for them.
Of course, it wasn’t only the curious young person who would share with the agony aunt of his or her puberty dilemmas, even grownups too!
Likewise, the married man who couldn’t quite turn to his buddies in the pub and tell them of his shame of not being able to get his pecker up with his wife found solace in a copy of Drum, People, You and would read of similar cases of men who shared his private struggles in the agony column.
I’m pretty sure that the same can be said for women as well.
The great thing about the letters penned to agony aunt is that they revealed two important things about human beings.
The first thing being that we all have the same challenges regardless of whether we are rich, poor, tall, short, beautiful and well not so beautiful. That just gave you hope and the sense of not being alone in the world. Of course, when reading of the agonies of the opposite sex you couldn’t help but giggle and be chaffed thinking to yourself, do girls really get weak at the knees when a guy holds them?
Secondly, convinced that agony aunt was a person gave one so much more confidence to explain your problem to her knowing only too well that she was a person prepared to listen to people’s problems and offer advice.
I don’t know about you, but it sure feels good to know that agony aunt wasn’t some search engine like Google or Yahoo that would bring out a whole range of answers to your question. That agony aunts have feelings, think, and can sympathise is something which, if search engines were able to do, would just make my day!
Sadly nowadays, agony aunts seem to have gone on a lifetime holiday and never seem to be around to share their wisdom and experience on life matters.
Unfortunately for me, my agonies seem to be piling up day by day and the agony aunt is nowhere around. It reminds me of that irritating voice that alerts you, “the subscriber you have dialled is not available, please try again later” whenever one is trying to get a hold of a person who is out of reach. Agony aunts are just not available!
Where are they? The same agony aunts who taught hordes of teenagers how to kiss their first boyfriend or girlfriend and taught them how to deal with the blood rush that came over their bodies whenever they saw the person that they liked. Aaaghh…enough just can’t be said about these people, we badly need agony aunts!
I have already started writing my usual agony letter and will give it to the first agony aunt that I will come across. It starts with the usual problem I have suffered for years now and it reads, “Dear Agony Aunt I have a crush on my friend…”
