Welcome to Dear Prudence. I'm Your Prudence, Janée Desmond Harris. This week we'll be discussing

how to decline a colleague's invitation to dinner, when it's okay to ghost a friend, and whether

it's possible to stay positive about finding love when you're completely burned out on dating apps.

Here to help me out today is the writer, professor, and commentator Roxanne Gay.

She's the author of books including New York Times bestsellers, Bad Feminist and Hunger,

and she writes the newsletter, The Audacity.

She gives advice on professional dilemmas as the New York Times

work friend columnist. Welcome, Roxanne. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for having me,

Janay. I'm excited. I want to start off by asking you for one piece of unsolicited advice.

Unsolicited advice is terrible. So I guess my one piece of advice would be don't offer unsolicited

advice. Fair, but it's very hard not to, right? I can barely control myself. I just love giving

advice so much. Me too. It's like, yeah, I'm totally ready to give you advice. I mean, we're both

lucky that we do it professionally,

but that doesn't stop me from still wanting to just weigh in unprompted all across my life.

It's never a deterrent. It's always like, I see you really doing something that's not good.

Let me help you. And generally people are like, I'm good. I want to fuck up.

Thanks.

Right.

But a good reason not to is that you're not responsible if things go awry.

Correct.

Because sometimes you give advice and, you know, people actually don't really want advice when they ask for advice.

I think that they want their opinion or the decision they've

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