The letter-writer, who signs herself "Thanks for Rescuing Me After I Was Drugged and Left for Dead-Not!" and whom we'll call "Thanks" because "TFRMAIWDALFDN!" sucks, went to hear some music with two old friends (both female). The last thing she remembers is leaving for the bathroom — someone had drugged her drink, and a police officer later found her lying alone on a sidewalk. Figuring she'd just left, her friends had left too, without looking for her. Thanks writes,

Later, when I called them from the street, sobbing in hysterics and asking for help, they told me to go back to the club and that they would have an ambulance pick me up there. When my mother-who lives 2,000 miles away (and hopped on a plane the next day to be with me)-later called these two friends of mine to beg them to join me while I was recovering, they refused. It wasn't until I told them that the hospital wouldn't release me until I had someone to drive me home that they came to pick me up. They then angrily drove me to my car, and I drove home alone. By then, it was the next morning.

Sounds shitty, right? Not to Rosenfeld. She says,

Wow, that's a tough call. A spouse or even a boyfriend? Yes, it would be his or her duty to haul ass to said hospital at 4 a.m. But your single female friends who are already, presumably tucked in their beddy-bies? I have to admit that, if I got a call like yours (or your mother's) in the middle of the night, I'd do what I could from home, but would be hard-pressed to jump in my car until morning.

Ouch — apparently if you're single, and don't have a willing mom, you are SOL if you need middle-of-the-night help. Or, as commenter L.S. Newfarmer eloquently puts it, "The message of your advice seems to be: if you expect to have someone there for you, find a boyfriend or live close to your mother." I have to admit, when I've been in relationships, I've tended to dial my boyfriend first if I need a difficult favor (like a ride to the hospital late at night). That said, I've also relied on my friends during both single and non-single periods for everything from midnight reassurances to last-minute apartment visits in faraway cities, and I think this might actually be healthier.

While it's nice to have someone who will drive you to the ER at 4 a.m., this isn't necessarily the best basis for a romantic relationship. Plenty of people, myself included at times, are willing to stay with a partner for the safety he/she provides — but friendships can provide this safety too. And being the only person your significant other can rely on creates a lot of stress in a relationship. Maybe one reason for the famed isolation of American life — and the equally famous (if slightly specious) excessive expectations American place on marriage and coupledom — is that too many people believe, like Rosenfeld, that you can depend on a boyfriend but not a friend.

Thanks might have been wise to make an agreement with her friends before the show that they would leave together. She might be wiser still, as commenter Newfarmer says, to "find friends who love you as much as you love them." Many Americans live far away from their moms, and many don't have parents who are alive or able-bodied enough to hop a plane. But the best solution isn't to get a boyfriend who's sexually obligated to respond to your midnight call. I'd much rather take Newfarmer's advice and build a network of people who take care of each other, so that my single days — and since we still generally outlive men, odds are that lots of a woman's days will be single ones — aren't filled with worry. And so that when I'm with someone, it's for love — not a ride to the ER.

Friend or Foe: My Friends Ditched Me When I Got Drugged! [Double X]

We can't rate all the advice columns on the internet (and we had to eliminate some for reasons of bias), but the following is a representative sampling. The grades, like advice, are totally subjective.

Dear Prudence, by Emily Yoffe
Unlike, say, Prudence Farrow, Emily Yoffe does not put up with any nonsense. Nonsense includes: masturbating too much, "using up [a woman's] most fertile years," and having doubts about a generally decent boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse. Though she sometimes provides a refreshing kick in the pants, or gets mad on behalf of people who aren't mad enough ("You're a generous and forgiving person. I'm less generous and forgiving"), but she also name-checks Emily Post a lot and seems creepily in favor of settling. She's not quite Dr. Laura, but she might be a little bit Lori Gottlieb.
Favorite topics: bad manners, terrible family secrets, silly relationship problems (his toupee!)
Words of wisdom: On masturbation — "Get a grip and give it a rest. Maybe if you make the decision to do something else with your hands (whittling? knitting? flossing?), you'll find you aren't so obsessed with your urges. Then masturbation will become a pleasurable thing you do sometimes instead of a twice-daily necessity."
Grade: B-

Friend or Foe, by Lucinda Rosenfeld
Friend or Foe focuses on friend drama, mostly of the female persuasion. Since Rosenfeld has only written three columns, it's hard to tell how she'll turn out, but as we've mentioned before, her column is predicated on a pretty competitive view of female closeness. Then again, her advice-seekers aren't doing anything to dispel this view. One writes that her so-called friend "swiped a significant amount of my Crème de la Mer" even though said friend "is beautiful, wrinkle-free, and rich-and I'm so not any of the above."
Favorite topics: back-stabbing, moisturizer thievery, and the baby as status symbol
Words of wisdom: "Clearly, your friend Haley was jealous and didn't know how to deal with your expanding belly. Similarly, the appearance of her own potential sperm donor has made her less threatened by the sight of all those Build-A-Bears strewn across your living room floor."
Grade: C

Savage Love, by Dan Savage
Dan Savage has been hugely influential, and we bet lots of college kids have traveled the trajectory from reading his columns aloud and laughing at the "freaks" to realizing that kinks don't make you bad or crazy, and accepting said kinks in themselves and others. Savage has added several important terms to the American sexicon — concerned yet time-strapped friends can now tell their deluded buddies to DTMFA. And he was using his column to raise awareness about gay marriage and gay rights long before Prop. H8 came on the scene. But he also subscribes to some troubling stereotypes — that only girls can be bi, for instance, or that black people are more homophobic than whites. He's also not particularly sympathetic to people who gain weight while in relationships. So while Dan Savage is a pretty good guy to have on your side if you're a superhero fetishist, he's not so good if you are, say, a bi black dude with body image issues — or if you believe, like Megan, that "a columnist who is all about letting people know the safest way to drink other people's urine" should be a little more open-minded about things like male sexual fluidity.
Favorite topics: open relationships (for), coprophilia (against), sexual word coinages ("santorum"), dumping-the-motherfucker-already
Words of wisdom: "Look, SAD, this isn't a relationship. It's a hostage situation. Your boyfriend is an asshole. Wait, maybe I'm not being fair-to assholes, which are as delightful as they are functional. Your boyfriend is a piece of shit, a loose stool, a santorum slick. And you, my dear, have the worst case of lousy-relationship-induced Stockholm syndrome that I've ever encountered."
Grade: B

Since You Asked, by Cary Tennis
I have to admit that Cary Tennis, with his long, loopy, and sometimes frankly unhelpful answers to equally long and loopy queries, has a special place in my heart. Maybe it's his acknowledgment that advice usually says more about the advice-giver than the problem at hand, or his unwillingness to come down hard on one side of any issue — until, when you least expect it, he does. Cary is kind of like a dithering, slightly dotty grandma — she goes off on tangents a lot, and sometimes she doesn't even answer your question, but she knows that life is complicated, being a good person is tough, and ultimately the only advice she can give is her own totally fallible opinion.
Favorite topics: writing, alcoholism, vague dissatisfaction, ennui
Words of wisdom:On the creative life — "But the work, that is another thing. The real work is staggering; the real work is work. It is not dream. It is pushing against the wall; it is hearing what we do not want to hear; it is doing the numbers; it is learning the new terms as they come along; it is sitting through evaluations and self-evaluations. It is an eternal object lesson in our powerlessness and our smallness. The real work is grinding and slow. "
Grade: A-

Obviously the primary point of any advice column isn't really to help advice-seekers — it's to entertain and soothe the readers, who, while we may not share the exact problems discussed, still have various shitty things in our lives that we want to feel better about. The guy who slept with his stepmom and the woman who likes oral sex from her dog make our own dilemmas seem smaller, but what really separates the great advice column from the so-so is its ability to make us feel that life is livable, that we are going to be okay. And sometimes the best way to do this is not to tell people what to do, but to acknowledge that we live in an uncertain universe, and that we all need to learn, in our own way, how to cope with that uncertainty.

Since You Asked [Salon]
Friend Or Foe [Double X]
Savage Love [The Stranger]
Dear Prudence [Slate]

Earlier: Dan Savage: Cool With Drinking Piss, Weird About Bisexuality
Dan Savage Has Stopped Blaming Black Voters For Prop 8

Heroine Wendy Murman is an editor at a leftist magazine, living with her husband in Brooklyn and struggling to conceive. Her best friend Daphne is a flighty, self-absorbed, semi-employed beauty who shocks Wendy when she ditches her unreliable married boyfriend for a hot, successful arch-conservative named Jonathan. Soon Daphne is married, pregnant, and installed in a beautiful house, and Wendy is beside herself with envy.

A little jealousy is certainly normal, but Rosenfeld paints the relationship between Wendy and Daphne — and indeed, between Wendy and all of her girlfriends — as so negative and competitive that you wonder why any of these people spend time together. Her e-mail exchanges with frenemy Paige are unrealistically bitchy, as when Paige writes,

Meanwhile — f.y.i. — I just read a very interesting article about infertility among women in our age group. It turns out that most of the issues (tube blockage, lack of cervical fluid, etc.) have their origin in STDs. Which is not to say you have one. Still, it might be worth checking.

Wendy begins the novel by wearily disregarding Daphne's threat of suicide, seems to find her conversation annoying, takes every interaction they have as a chance to compare herself to Daphne and find herself wanting, and remembers countless times throughout their friendship when Daphne has let her down. She recalls, for instance, the night her first boyfriend dumped her, when Daphne promised that they could "go to the movies 'and forget about all [their] guy problems." Instead,

An hour later, Daphne was putting on her coat and saying, "I totally forgot I said I'd meet Josh. Are you going to be okay if I go out for a few hours? I promise I'll be back soon." (Face squinched up.)

Face squinched up? Given this and basically every other scene between Wendy and Daphne, it's hard to see why Wendy doesn't just find better friends — or at least friends who make her feel better.

Unless Rosenfeld's point is that female friendship is inherently toxic. She says on her website, "every woman has a Daphne in her life — a so-called "best friend" whose seemingly effortless successes never fail to make her feel like a Huge Loser." Really? Everyone has a best friend so fake she deserves quotes? And for whom her jealousy outweighs her joy? Sadly, reviewers seem to concur. Publishers' Weekly calls I'm So Happy For You "a dark, hilarious and painfully accurate view of the less-than-pure reasons why women stay friends." And Zoe Heller calls it "a finely observed and witty account of the jealousies that lurk within even the kindest female hearts."

Rosenfeld's Double X advice column, Friend or Foe (tagline: "Boys are easy. Friendships are hard.") adds fuel to the girlfriends-totally-suck fire. Her most recent column implies that a friend's disappearance after the birth of a child must be the result of envy. She also writes about dangerous friend archetypes like the "Instant Best Friend" who dumps you at the slightest provocation (and who quite easily recognizes herself and lashes back in the comments!), or the "Time Energy Suck [...] who dins and sniffles in your ear for hours at a time about first dates who never called again and ex-lovers with whom she broke up eight years ago-'it's just still so hard.'" Friendships can be hard, but are they really so hard that we need names for different bad ones? Doesn't this just perpetuate a sad stereotype of women as catty bitches who undermine each other?

There is, however, a slightly more hopeful way to interpret all this. As Wendy descends further and further into insane jealousy of Daphne, her husband Adam offers this explanation of her behavior:

You're never satisfied. That's just who you are. You felt deprived as a child, and there's nothing anyone can do to make it up to you. You could marry Bill Gates and still think you were getting fucked over.

It's harsh, but also feels true — a lot of Wendy's problems seem to come from her constant sense of being worse off than others, and her inability to appreciate what she has. Only when she stops comparing herself to Daphne can she finally be happy. It is possible to read I'm So Happy For You as a cautionary tale against the kind of jealousy that makes every baby, every relationship, every apartment, every job into a mere data point in a constant status accounting. If it's Rosenfeld's point that this is no way to live your life, more power to her. But why does she have to make it sound like every woman lives this way?
I'm So Happy For You [Amazon]
I'm So Happy For You [Official Site]
Friend Or Foe [Double X]