My favorite Tough Love question from the last eight years, the one I (somewhat inexplicably) recall most fondly, was from a woman whose boyfriend was grossed out that she used a pee rag—a.k.a. reusable toilet paper—while camping. We got a lot of impassioned reader feedback about that one: Pee is sanitary! Pee is gross! Bodies are normal! Women’s bodies in particular are gross! (OK, dude.) And though I’d phrase my answer differently now, I stand by the gist of it: If you don’t want your boyfriend weighing in on your wiping habits, don’t tell him about them. Wherever that couple is now, together or apart, I hope they’ve figured out how to pee in peace.

　　The secret about an outdoors advice column, of course, is that it’s basically a regular advice column with the words “while camping” tacked to the end of each question. Consider:

　　Should I break up with my boyfriend? He’s ignoring my boundaries while camping.

　　How do I stop hating my body while camping?

　　I’m desperately lonely. While camping, I mean. Obviously. Right?

　　“While camping” is Outside magazine’s “asking for a friend”: a framing that distances us just enough from our problems that we might gather the courage to speak them aloud. The questions that readers sent to Tough Love were almost never uniquely outdoors-specific. Rather, the outdoors served as both backdrop and shared language between asker and reader. A number of thru-hikers, climbers, kayakers, skiers, and runners wrote to me over the years, but their problems weren’t about, say, the best way to dry long johns over a campfire. They were about grief, illness, heartbreak, anxiety, and love. Outside’s community, more than anyone, should know that wherever we go, our shadows follow. And it’s often in the most spectacular places—a mountaintop at sunrise, a bonfire with friends—that our worries are cast in the greatest relief.

　　At the core, advice columns are gossip.

　　And yet there is something unique about an outdoors advice column, less in the specifics of individual problems than in the way those problems reveal the contours of bigger, communal ones. By far the most common questions I received, again and again, were variations on two issues. First: I am a man, and I’m struggling to find and date women who are outdoorsy. Second: I am an outdoorsy woman, and men won’t date me because I’m better/stronger/faster than they are. It would be too simple to suggest that the writers of these letters meet, date each other, and thus solve all their problems, because it’s precisely the contrast between these two categories that reveals the root of the issue. What is it? Misogyny (or to phrase it as generously as possible for individual men: the sexist pressure on them to be more accomplished than their girlfriends or wives). Men, if you want to date outdoorsy women, there are plenty available—but you might need to work on your insecurities first. As for women who date men? At least some of us are outta luck.

　　At the core, advice columns are gossip. It’s a myth—an excuse we tell ourselves, as part of the writer-columnist-reader triad—that their purpose is to deliver wisdom to the letter-writer. Instead, the whole dynamic is a collaboration, an exchange. Readers rubberneck, reassuring themselves that although they make plenty of mistakes, they would never make that one. Alternately, they take comfort in the fact they’re not alone. And the letter-writer shares something vulnerable, under cover of anonymity, in exchange for being seen.

　　I never shared letter-writers’ identities, even with my editors. A few questions were written by celebrities. Some were sent by my friends. Some people were so cautious that they wrote in under fake names, from fake email addresses. And at least one question was my own. (A great exercise, in a tricky situation, is to imagine that you’re an advice columnist and someone sent in a letter about your exact situation. How would you reassure them? What would you recommend they do? And if you happened to write an actual advice column, wouldn’t you be tempted to publish the exchange?) There were questions, too, that I never had a chance to answer, either because they were too similar to ones we’d already published, or because they lacked context. “What do I do next?” someone once wrote, as the entirety of their email. I just wanted to give them a hug.

　　I suspect my primary strength as an advice columnist is that I don’t think I have the answers.

　　Sometimes readers sent in advice for other letter-writers, pouring their hearts out over shared experiences, and I passed the messages along. Other times, folks corrected my takes, explaining details I’d missed or ways my response was short-sighted. Regarding a woman with asthma whose boyfriend accused her of abandoning him when she had to leave a campground due to wildfire smoke, I received, to Tough Love’s email address, this phenomenal piece of reader feedback: “The fact that your advice to this poor woman was decent enough does not justify your presuming, as a dogsledder, to answer her deeply concerning plea.”

　　I texted my friend a screenshot, delighted by the implication that dogsledders are uniquely bad at giving advice. “Does she think that advice columnists go to… advice column school?” she texted back.

　　In fact, at the time I started writing Tough Love, I was just out of grad school, living on $18,000 a year and supporting a fledgling sled dog team. I’d written an essay—a love letter, really—that went viral, and got passed around Outside’s editors. When they approached me about writing an outdoors relationship advice column, I felt like I’d won the lottery, and in a way I had: a steady freelance gig is practically as rare. I was on a road trip when I got the email. To give me practice, my now-husband read letters from Cosmo magazine aloud, tweaking details to make them outdoors-specfic. I still remember: “What do you do if you get cum in your eye,” he asked me, “in the woods?”

　　I had no idea. Stick your face in a river? I googled it. Then I regretted googling it. I probably wouldn’t get that question, I reassured myself. On the other hand, what if I did? I didn’t want to guide people wrong. Or make their eyes hurt. I felt then about the column, and always have, an intense pressure to do no harm.

　　Problems are inherently vulnerable; they invite vulnerability in return.

　　I suspect my primary strength as an advice columnist is that I don’t think I have all the answers. For some questions, I dug deeply into my own experience.Those columns are still raw and near to my heart, whether they’re about grief, being a woman alone in the wilderness, writing a memoir, or the fear of losing a dog. But more often, I used the questions as springboards to approach and interview people—family members, friends, even strangers I admired—whose wisdom I wanted to both learn from and pass on. With particularly puzzling situations, I even brought up the questions at dinner parties, asking folks around the table to weigh in. It was in response to these strangers’ questions that people close to me shared some of their most tender truths. For that, I’ll always be grateful.

　　At the close of the column, I think its greatest lesson, at least for me, is this: we should ask each other for advice more. The questions don’t even have to be our own. Share situations you’ve read about, or heard about, or even seen on TV, and ask your loved ones what they’d recommend. Problems are inherently vulnerable; they invite vulnerability in return. You’ll be surprised by how often people will take the invitation to say what they’ve needed to say.