It is always Year Zero

It's not the situation that is interesting, or even the advice, but rather, the instinctive inclination to tell the husband to play ostrich:

We have just celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary and, although not a big Facebook user, I decided to post a message about my wife. I used her maiden name and a picture of her when we first met — saying how I was so lucky to meet her and how happy I was that she decided to become my Mrs.

At first I got a few ‘likes’ — but then I started to get comments from people I’d never heard of.

One in particular was from a woman saying she was amazed our marriage had lasted 30 years because when she shared a house with my wife (not then my wife, of course) and two other girls, my wife held the record: having sex with 11 different blokes in one month.
Tempting though it is to advise you to keep silent and just get on with life, I’m wondering if that would be helpful.

I don’t want this to fester. It might be better to laugh the whole thing off, saying, ‘Do you remember a weird girl called X? She told me she shared a house with you . . . but anyway, she sounds a bit unpleasant so I’m not bothering with that Facebook stuff any more. You never know who’ll crawl out of the woodwork, do you?’ Or words to that effect.

What you mustn’t do is ask any question about that part of your wife’s life, because the details are not your business.

Frankly (and don’t be shocked), if she did have a few boyfriends, so what? She was free — and then she married you, oh lucky man.

I believe the trollette’s salacious stories are a loo-roll of lies and I speak as one who has had lies told about me in the past.

It’s pretty horrible, but you know what — I don’t care! Life is too short to deal with this rubbish, so throw it all into an imaginary dustbin… crunch, crash, replace the lid and quickly wash your hands.

Unhappy, lonely women are more or less crazy, and many of them turn malicious. So, the odds are very high that this guy's wife is entirely innocent of the historical deeds she supposedly committed. That being said, the first thing the guy should have done was ask his wife: did you live with X? And the second thing he should have done was show her what the other woman was saying about her.

Regardless of what the wife did or didn't do, regardless of what the husband believes, if nothing else, he owes it to his wife to let her know what sort of rumors are being publicly spread about her.

But it is important to note that, as always, the female advice columnist's reaction is to absolve the wife of any responsibility for her possible past and to demand that the husband simply consider himself lucky, even if he has been shamelessly lied to.

This is why one should never take advice from women about women. It's like asking a burglar if you should lock your doors at night or not.