Dear Dina, My best friend recently started dating this really toxic girl who treats him like a pet dog or something. I find her horribly obnoxious, but she keeps trying to get herself invited at parties I throw at my place. The rest of the time, I feel like I need to cross miles of red tape just to hang out with my best friend. So recently, I decided to distance myself from this nonsense, and I unfriended her on Facebook. It resulted in my friend calling me up to yell at me. To make matters worse, the girlfriend keeps texting me all kinds of abuse. Please let me know what I can do about this! Dear Unfriender, So, while this relationship predicament troubles me on many levels, I will focus on the shocking degree of spinelessness exhibited by both you and your best friend. While it’s certainly tragic that your friend has found romance with this allegedly domineering and unpleasant woman, why you have focused your ire on said female is where my bone of contention lies. Your BFF has selected this termagant to be his mate; by trying to sideline her while attempting to maintain the status quo with him, you leave her no choice but to fight for her rightful place by his side. Instead of passive-aggressively trying to unfriend her both in the real and the virtual world, it would make more sense to bench the boy. He should be made to understand that his appalling taste in women should not impinge upon your social life, and he can be friendless until he finds someone who treats him more like a partner than a poodle. Either he will grow a spine when the abuse becomes intolerable, or his girlfriend will get fed up and find a new doormat on which to wipe her DMs. Regardless, don’t be a cliché and victimize the woman when clearly your male friend is the real source of the problem here. Dear Dina, My father, who is in his 70’s, has recently discovered social media. Unfortunately, being from the generation that thinks chain emails are a thing, he now subjects everyone in the family to a steady barrage of pass-around emails (the kind that says I'll have bad luck if I don't forward it), along with boring anti-marriage jokes, and unsolicited health advice. Telling him to stop only results in a temporary respite and then he's at it again. How do I get him to lay off for good? Dear Detention, While I’m a great believer in telling people the brutal truth, in this case I think you’re being a smidge nasty. You should consider yourself lucky that your father can navigate social media in his advanced years and is enjoying himself without the aid of a rotary telephone or telex machine. He could be a doddering incontinent or a grumpy curmudgeon, or one of those geezers who repeat the same tired stories about their youth at every Friday lunch, while you frantically shovel rice into your mouth so as not to be the last one stuck at the table. I mean, you could unfriend him and remove all remaining vestiges of joy in his frail and aged soul. Or you could suck it up and just humour the old guy. He did give you life, after all. What are a few bad jokes compared to that? And anyway, how long could it possibly last? A few years, if he’s lucky?