Well, in a very general sense you may have agreed with Prudie, but I like how you worded it better and agree with you too. :-)

I normally understand the difficulty of mixing families, and tend to advocate giving greater understanding and compassion to people having difficulty, but it's just as you said - 1) ten or more years is plenty of time to get over the divorce of your parents, and 2) she's an adult, for goodness sake, so she should be better able to handle uncomfortable situations with (hopefully) some grace (as compared to children).

I'm not even sure why LW#2 wrote in. All she has to do is ask her friends if they would be willing to take guardianship in the event of their death. Either they will say say yes or they will say no, but the only way to find out is to just ask. Why spend so much time agonizing over it, instead of just getting it over with and doing it?

As for LW#3, I remember the days where my friends tried to push me into relationships... Like they'd say this guy was really interested in me, and he wasn't. They'd also fib to the guy and say that I was really interested in him, when I really wasn't. Then, they'd try to get us to hook up. Why do that? I think they were just trying to get a good laugh out of it.

I don't think any of these relationships are serious, so I can't claim to feel any strong emotion about anything to do with these kiddy relationships, but why get into something that is obviously going to involve drama? Some people say they're your friend, but they're really NOT. You're better off telling these "friends" where they can stuff their dumb opinion and stop using you for their entertainment.

As for the last letter writer, I have to admit I have an awful time with remembering names, and I'm in my twenties, so it's not a sign of age. So, I end up either having to ask a person for their name more than once before it sticks in my brain, or I'll try to find some way of addressing them that doesn't involve using their name. It's particularly awkward when some people are better at remembering names, and they know my name, but I don't know theirs. Personally, I would find name tags to be a godsend! It would make me feel a lot better that I don't have to worry about being on unequal footing (i.e., someone knowing my name, but I don't know theirs). :-)

I know some people think that it would make better conversation to go on ahead and keep asking people for their names, but I think it makes for boring conversation. It'd be nice to move past the asking people for their names and move onto some REAL conversation.

Now, I lost track of where I was going with this... After we're done talking about the name tags, what else was there to talk about? Oh yeah, what was the original reason for this party? I think the letter-writer kind of lost focus on that by overly emphasizing these name tags... Think about the purpose of the party...forget about any objections or whatever to the name tags.