couples have started asking us for advice and I am not sure we should be giving it

Eleven years, which apparently makes us the old hands at the two socials we go to.

Over the last year or so we have noticed something shifting. Newer couples come and find us. Somebody will get us in a corner and ask what to do about a partner who has gone quiet, or about a man who will not answer a direct question, or about the drop. Last month a woman I had met twice asked me whether she should go ahead with something on Saturday, and clearly wanted a yes or a no.

I gave her neither and felt like a coward about it.

Here is what worries me. I have opinions, obviously. Eleven years produces opinions. But everything I know is what worked in one marriage, mine, between two specific people with our particular set of nerves and habits. I do not know whether any of it generalises. When I say something with confidence at a social, it lands with the weight of eleven years attached, and somebody may go home and act on it.

My wife thinks I am being precious. Her view is that people ask because there is nobody else to ask, and that a slightly wrong answer from somebody who has done it is more use than no answer at all. She may well be right.

But I have watched a couple take something I said about pausing, apply it to a situation that was nothing like ours, and have a fairly bad six months. I have never mentioned that to them and I think about it more than I would like.

So for anyone else who has become the experienced couple in their bit of the world. How do you answer? Do you give an opinion or do you only tell them what happened to you? And has anybody had advice go wrong in a way that changed how they give it?

Five years in and I have started getting a bit of this too, on a smaller scale, and it made me realise how much of what I would say is just what happened to work for us twice.

The single half of an arrangement, and what I would say from the receiving end is that the advice couples give each other is almost always about couples. I have sat at the edge of several of these conversations and the person nobody in them is thinking about is the third. If you are going to be the experienced ones, that is the gap I would fill, because nobody else in the room will.

Answer with the story rather than the rule. If you tell somebody that overnights are a mistake, they will either obey you or dismiss you. If you tell them what happened when you tried one in 2019, they can work out whether their situation resembles yours, and you have not had to pretend to know anything about their marriage. It also makes it much harder for anybody to quote you at their wife.