Beatrijs Ritsema has been prescribing for more than twenty years Fidelity the Modern Ways section, about our vicissitudes in our daily dealings with each other. It became the most popular section of the newspaper. She passed away on Thursday.
In one of the first episodes of Modern Manners, the section that will be running from September 2002 Fidelity appeared, Beatrijs Ritsema replies to a young woman who is annoyed by a friend’s rude eating habits: ‘Don’t take it too seriously. This is a friend of yours and not a lover. Fierce love relationships can sometimes crash due to environmental differences or unpleasant eating habits, but a little friendship should be able to withstand that.’ The answer, in all its sobriety, lightness and pragmatism, could have been written by her yesterday. Just like the question, by the way: according to her, those questions have not changed so fundamentally in all those years, she said a few years ago in an interview with Fidelity.
In twenty years, Modern Ways, in which social psychologist Ritsema answered questions about manners and other issues from readers, became the best-read, highest-rated and most-loved column of Fidelity. Questions and answers about complicated weddings, difficult funerals, unwanted gifts, nagging co-workers, impossible husbands, dead guinea pigs, stepchildren, money and other matters invariably landed high in the statistics when it came to readership.
A Beatrice ritual on Saturday morning
No other column in the newspaper received so much response from readers. Questions and answers were spelled accurately. Many readers turned out to be there, they told her enthusiastically on reader days Fidelity where she was a guest several times, to have a special Beatrice ritual on Saturday morning. Then one read the question to the other, with the answer covered. Then there was speculation about what Beatrice would answer. And then came the testing. And how often did one experience a situation that evoked the cry: ‘A real question for Beatrice!’
Such occasions, such a reader’s day, were not the easiest for her. She found talking, especially in front of an audience, more complicated than writing, she said.
With her sometimes unorthodox or angular answers, she not only evoked approval. Many e-mails that ended up in the inbox of magazine Tijdgeest, where her column appeared in recent years, started in the same way: ‘I usually agree with you / I love Beatrice / Beatrice’s advice is always very useful to me, but this times…’, whereupon the email writer explained why she really missed the point. A recent letter that elicited many reactions was her advice to go to Mallorca with her mother-in-law, even though the questioner no longer wants to fly. “This plane trip won’t push the planet over the brink of doom,” Beatrice wrote. Immediately after it appeared on the website on Friday afternoon, the emails poured in.
The famous Shepherd Hour
The letter from one of the first years in Fidelity about the ‘Shepherd’s Hour’, in which she advises a 26-year-old gay man who complains about his flawed sexual relationship to secretly have sex outside the door every now and then. Then it rained letters. Mainly because of the secret. on its website the essay which she devoted to the matter in reply.
Those who followed her could indeed see patterns. According to her son, she was amused de Volkskrant, she advised anyone who was struggling with his relationship: “Stop it!” Which, according to her, was also true: she didn’t believe in talking when things were already difficult. And actively cancel friendships? Never do it, at most reduce the frequency.
The section, which she previously for HP/The Time wrote, but rather continued in a newspaper, started at a time when newspapers, too Fidelity, gradually gave more attention to personal life, to issues related to the daily lives of readers and not just the big world news. Which concerned not only the head, but also the heart.
What was special about the section was that Ritsema gave the concept of etiquette a new meaning, which was not about the correct position of glasses, cutlery and napkins, but that she stretched it to social intercourse: rules of conduct, how do we keep it a bit nice and civilized with each other, how do we relate to all the dilemmas we stumble over every day?
The source of inspiration was the Miss Manners section The Washington Post, written by the now 84-year-old Judith Martin. Ritsema liked to read it when she lived in Washington, although Miss Manners, she says, was more about ‘real’ etiquette, like how to write a thank-you note.
‘Dear Beatrice’ is a persona
Despite all the topics that passed: she doubted whether people could really get to know her through the column. That was not her first need either.
“’Dear Beatrice’ is a persona”, she said in 2017 to Dana Ploeger who interviewed her in Fidelity. It was not like she was in everyday life, with her husband (ex-NRCeditor Maarten Huygen) and her three grown children (two sons and a daughter). Then she didn’t scatter advice at all and she wasn’t particularly moralistic either, she said. “I have no other guru qualities. My kids also thought it was pretty ridiculous that I go through life as an etiquette expert.”
Ritsema saw herself first and foremost as a journalist, as someone who wants to write something good and entertaining, not as a ‘life advisor’. But as someone with a great interest in human behavior. That is also why she started studying social psychology. She started as a social science researcher at Leiden University, after which she was editor of the student magazine for a short time Personal Care. From 1983 she works as a freelance journalist for NRC Handelsblad, HP/The Time, Free Netherlands in Fidelity. She wrote several books, including the collection of essays The beleaguered ego, Sincerely. A guide to love in The Great Etiquette Book. appeared in 2020 Modern Etiquettea new collection of columns.
Hard work helps better than talking
Why did she throw herself into other people’s often relatively small but thorny issues with so much love and dedication? She herself enjoyed a strict upbringing in the family in which she grew up. They were three sisters. It was the wild sixties, seventies. Not much was allowed. Not out of morality, but because of her mother’s fears. The fact that her sister was killed by a drunk driver at the age of sixteen was a terrible disaster for the family, she said in Fidelity. Later, her father, an accomplished mountain climber, fell on his head, a fall that left him brain-damaged and never to be the same again. Seeing how her parents’ marriage turned into hell afterwards was terrible to her.
When her sister died, she was already gone. She suppressed it and started working and studying very hard, she said. “I’m not the type to lie on the couch crying and I don’t see anything in talking. People often didn’t even know about my sister’s death because I didn’t mention it. You cannot be helped or comforted anyway. I think hard work helps better than talking.”
As a ‘Shell’ child, she grew up partly abroad: she was born in Tunisia, later she lived in Colombia, the Netherlands and French-speaking Belgium. Moving as a young girl was no problem for her, she always adapted quite quickly. When she was eleven and her parents went to Turkey, she stayed at a boarding school in Brabant. She did find it difficult to move to The Hague as a teenager. Later she lived with her husband, in those years correspondent for NRC, in Washington. She felt like she could live anywhere, she said.
More than a year ago, the editors received a message from Beatrijs: she was ill, she had lung cancer and would not get better. It wasn’t a secret, but it didn’t have to be publicized either: too much fuss and reactions, for example from readers, that was not for her. She wanted to keep writing as long as she could, and she did. Until the last column that she sent this week with the help of her son.
As a tribute to Beatrijs Ritsema, we would like to show how important she has been to our readers. What significance has Modern Manners had for you? Please email in max. 150 words to [email protected]no later than Wednesday, March 22 at 12 noon.
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