Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

Happily Ever After, a 29-year-old woman on the brink of marriage, wonders if she should retract the offer of having her 53-year-old sister and brother-in-law walk her down the aisle. While she used to consider this couple’s relationship a model marriage, she changed her mind after learning that they had both dabbled with infidelity. She feels that infidelity would be the breaking point of a relationship and is dejected that two people who seem so perfect for each other find it hard to stay faithful all the time.

Sugar writes that while she and Mr. Sugar were madly in love from the outset, there was this point about a year into the relationship where she discovered that he had been unfaithful to her. He had been horny and drunk while visiting a female acquaintance and succumbed to temptation despite being “crazy in love” with Sugar (291). Sugar initially threatened to end the relationship after her sense of herself as the only one for him was ruined; however, it gave them the opportunity to have a conversation about fidelity and desire and made their relationship stronger in the long term. She attests that every long-term couple will need to get through seemingly insurmountable obstacles, whether infidelity is involved or not, and that the kind of perfection that Happily Ever After is seeking stems from a false belief that she can control the uncontrollable.

A young woman who calls herself LTL, facing financial difficulty and an inevitable layoff, has agreed to enter an arrangement to have sex with a married man twice a week for the price of $1,000. While she is concerned about the legality of the plan as well as the moral ramifications of undisclosed infidelity and wants to cry whenever she thinks of the man touching her, she thinks that she can detach from her feelings and enter the arrangement. She also writes that she does not really enjoy sex, although she considers that this is normal.

Sugar advocates that the woman cannot make detached decisions where her body and personal moral code are concerned. Instead, she would be better served by looking into her issues, such as the wounds that lie beneath her aversion to sex.

Could Be Worse, a woman who endured sadistic behavior from her father during childhood, such as being locked in her room for days, has recently cut him out of her life, following his crass betrayal of her mother and his diatribe against her when she takes her mother’s side. While her mother has since forgiven her husband, the woman wants to stay away from him, even as she feels that he still controls aspects of her. Although he will be the only father she ever has, she wonders if having a relationship with him is worth it.

Sugar praises Could Be Worse for setting boundaries with such an abusive man. However, while she has severed ties with her father, their relationship continues, and it may take a long time to fully come to terms with him. She will have to make sense of him and what he did, even if she never sees him again. While Sugar was mainly estranged from her father, she entertained having a relationship with him after her mother died if he acknowledged the harm he had inflicted during childhood. This more or less reoccurred 17 years later, when he reached out to her and she wrote back asking for insight on the past. He vehemently refused, and Sugar had to accept that she would live the rest of her life without him.

Torn and Distraught, a man who has overcome his own familial drug addiction, worries about what to do when his wife and the mother of their 18-month-old daughter is mired in her own addiction but also wants to move across the country for a job and to be close to her family. The man wishes to stay in Los Angeles and continue his meaningful job working with disadvantaged and unhoused youth; however, he is tormented by the thought of being away from his daughter.

Sugar replies that his daughter’s welfare ought to be his primary concern here, as she will not be safe with his wife until she has her addiction under control. Everything else, including decisions about where either he or his wife should live, is secondary. They should therefore focus on seeking out resources to ensure her recovery.

Aggressive, a soon-to-be spouse, feels angry at the grueling prospect of getting through a wedding and asks for Sugar’s advice.

Sugar assumes that Aggressive is a bride who feels under pressure for everything on her big day to be perfect. Instead of focusing on this, she should see the wedding as “a messy, beautiful, and gloriously unexpected day in your sweet life” (317). Sugar’s own wedding to Mr. Sugar was full of mishaps; however, in the long run, these turned into precious stories and memories.

Big Fan is eager to hear more about Sugar’s treatment of the subject of how people “don’t know what something will turn out to be until [they]’ve lived it” (320). Sugar offers a story of going to a yard sale with her mother when she was 18. While she was dismissive of most objects, a red velvet toddler dress priced at $1 caught her eye. At that stage, Sugar did not want to have kids, but her mother bought the dress for her anyway, just in case. The red dress was kept a secret into Sugar’s thirties. When she did give birth to a daughter, she found it moving that her mother had bought a dress for the granddaughter she would never know. Sugar’s point is that we should “keep faith” with the uncertainty of life and trust that the meaning will be revealed to us (323).

Sugar receives letters from two women on opposing sides of a love triangle. Friend or Foe, the first sender, feels guilty about sleeping with a guy she promised her friend she would not sleep with, owing to the friend’s complicated history with this man. She has previously slept with friends’ partners and feels disturbed that she “value[s] desire at the expense of [her] friendships” (325). Triangled, the second sender, is the woman who laid down the prohibition, owing to her complicated feelings for the man, despite his clarification that he did not want a relationship with her. However, when her friend slept with him, it reawakened the freshness of her heartbreak. She has since reflected that her jealousy may arise from a desire for control and is ashamed for her hurt feelings, as her friends did not do anything immoral by sleeping together.

Sugar advocates that both women know they could have behaved better. In the first instance, Triangled would have been better off being honest about not being over the male friend’s lack of interest in her and face up to her feelings. She might need to take space from this friend and any woman he is involved with, including Friend or Foe. Then, Sugar casts Friend or Foe as “a woman who took what she wanted instead of what she needed” by choosing the guy over a meaningful and lasting relationship with her friend (333).

Anonymous, a 20-something-year-old male, worries about his pattern of sleeping with women and then losing interest in them. He wonders if this has anything to do with his mother.

Sugar advocates that Anonymous is a typical 20-something-year-old who is “searching for the thing inside that allows us to feel at home in the world” (336). While exploring his sexuality is natural for someone his age, he might resist getting stuck in this pattern by not sleeping with every woman he finds interesting. He will ultimately go on a journey of self-discovery and find his home in himself.

Helpless Mom, a woman who was raised by a mother with anger issues, loves her two daughters but finds that she always reaches a point where she loses her temper. She once flung her daughter across the lawn and is now scared by her own anger. She fears that the temper is “hardwired” in her and that she will never change, even though she has begun therapy (339).

Sugar reassures Helpless Mom that all mothers who raise young children are brought to the brink but that she is concerned about her negative belief that she can never change. She advises Helpless Mom to ask her husband to do more in the way of childcare to give her some space for herself. She thinks that the woman needs to reframe her anger as “a storm that passes harmlessly through [her] and peters out into the softest rain before it fades to sun” (341).

During her volunteer work with 10 angry boys, Sugar saw this process becoming effective, as middle schoolers from deprived backgrounds with rage issues managed to control their anger with techniques such as walking and taking a break from the context at hand.

Seeking Wisdom, a 22-year-old, asks Sugar what she wishes she had known when she was her age.

Sugar begins by advising her younger self to not waste time on body-image insecurities, trying to get those who do not love her to change their minds, feeling terrible because she wants to leave a good person, or complaining about how long it will take to write her book. Referring to the title of the piece and this book, she says that even when one feels like the lowest form of human, one still has the right to “tiny beautiful things” (352), like the random gift of a purple balloon that Sugar once refused but wishes she had accepted. There is also a final regret, in not saying thank you to her mother for the Christmas gift of a coat that she initially dismissed.