No relationship is considered complete without giving advice to others. Even parents give advice to their children when they turn forty. Younger cousins give advice to their elders about marriage. Friends give advice about child delivery, in-laws give advice in the kitchen, and even colleagues who know nothing about the subject give advice. The act of advising is not taken as a service here; instead, it is seen as an obligation, and not offering advice can be taken as a sign of not loving the other person.
This is not merely the issue of being nosy, as this might appear. This shows a basic belief held in the society: the one who is concerned for another person gets the right to guide them. Love is not shown through restraint in such societies. If one loves the other person, it means he or she talks about the other person’s weight, marriage, degree, bank balance, and house all at once. In such societies, silence is seen as not being bothered about others. If one relative does not say anything about your life choices, then you assume that they do not care about you at all.
It is an old social equation between advice and affection. In societies based on joint families, the biradari system, and interdependent communities, no decision was an individual act but a reflection on the reputation of the entire family. Your marriage reflected on your parents’ reputation. Your career reflected your father’s reputation. Your domestic decisions were a reflection on the reputation of your mother-in-law. If there is to be a shared outcome, there must also be a shared decision-making process. Giving unsolicited advice is, therefore, not really overstepping in such a social context. What has happened is that the context has changed faster than people’s behavioural patterns. People have moved from joint families to nuclear families; they have started marrying and making career decisions for themselves, which their parents cannot imagine and so on. However, the advice continues to pour in as if all decisions belong to everybody.
In this manner, advice can be a covert sign of superiority. Older family members give advice to younger ones; males give advice to females more frequently than the reverse; those considered successful give advice to those who are less so. An unmarried woman, once she reaches a certain age, is available for discussion about her chances. A man who does not have children is asked, in the presence of total strangers, what he has planned in terms of “finishing” his family. Someone who is overweight gets advice on his diet from people who do not care to check their blood test results. Concern is very often an attempt to exert power over another individual’s life under the guise of doing him a favour. The one giving advice is never at fault if his advice turns out to be wrong.
However, none of this implies that advice is intrinsically bad. On the contrary, it is often quite helpful, and it would be quite arrogant to reject advice simply because it is offered. A parent who warns you against making a poor financial choice, a friend who warns you against a dishonest lover, an older person with experience with a certain disease — all of these give some valuable information, which cannot be disregarded just for that reason. The difference is rather between advice offered and advice forced. The former allows refusal, while the latter treats rejection of the advice as an offence that may be used against the recipient for years to come.
That is why the act of giving and taking advice in Pakistani society is so frequently draining rather than helpful. It is not the content of the advice that makes it draining, but its quantity and repetitiveness, along with the belief that one’s personal choices and decisions can be made available for editing by anyone whose position or feelings towards them carry enough weight. The choice about marriage, having children, where to live, and so on attracts advice not only from one’s own family members, but also from in-laws, from one’s cousins, neighbours, colleagues — everyone, in short, who cares about one and knows about his decisions and thinks he should have better ideas.
The clearest indicator that such a culture of advice has gone beyond being useful is the fact that it so rarely starts from curiosity. Advice is typically formulated in response to a question: “What are your intentions?” What is important to you in all this? Unsolicited advice, on the other hand, is almost always offered on the basis of a conclusion that has been reached.
This change will not involve giving up caring for one another, which has always been one of the finer points about belonging to such a close-knit community. This involves setting aside the need for control and recognising that people can be loved without necessarily controlling them. Good advice is still good advice when there is a boundary recognised.