About
DearWendy.com, launched in January 2011 and updated daily, is a place for people to pose questions about the relationship issues in their lives and get the kind of advice and feedback their best friend is probably too skeerd to give them. (You can read the site’s most popular posts here). DearWendy.com is inspired by the column of the same name, which became popular on TheFrisky.com, a lady-centric site originally owned and operated by Turner Media. The column has been featured regularly on CNN.com, and quoted and excerpted in places like “The Washington Post” and NPR.org. DearWendy.com is run by Wendy Atterberry who lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband, Drew, their baby boy, Jackson, and their two cats, Simone and Miles.
Wendy was born on Okinawa, Japan in 1976. Her parents were/are educators on military bases and she spent her whole childhood moving from one military installation to another, including stops in: Chinhae, Korea; Tokyo, Japan; Seoul, Korea; and Osterholz and Bitburg, Germany. Her roots are in the Midwest where she and her family spent every summer shuttling between St. Louis, Missouri and Springfield, Illinois. She split the difference after high school and went to college in Missouri, and lived in Chicago for most of her 20s.
A few months before she turned 30, she met Drew on a blind date during a weekend trip to New York. Their mutual friend who set them up was right; they did hit it off, and they spent the next year and a half eating terrible airport food, going way over their cell phone minutes, and dreaming about a day they could stop saying good-bye all the time. That came when Wendy moved from Chicago to Drew’s one-bedroom bachelor pad in Manhattan in September, 2007. They got engaged in Central Park a year and a half later, were married in Central Park that July and moved to Brooklyn the following June. Their son, Jackson, was born in October, 2011.
Somewhere along the way from Okinawa to Brooklyn, Wendy picked up a lot about the way people relate to each other and how universal the “human condition” really is. The things we want — love, understanding, acceptance and companionship — and the way we’d like to achieve them — the path of least resistance — are pretty universal. But sometimes we need help figuring out what is what. And that’s where this site comes in. This is very much a community effort and Wendy welcomes your comments, letters, and constructive criticism. (For information about her commenting policy, as well as other frequently asked questions, check out her FAQ page).
When she’s not giving advice, Wendy loves travel, bargain hunting, flea marketing, trying new recipes, brunch, biking, sitting on the grass in the park, gin cocktails, interior design, dive bars, karaoke, champagne, spending time with friends and family, and eavesdropping on strangers’ conversations. She likes to think of this site as a kind of eavesdropping that’s fully encouraged. So, please, pour yourself a drink and butt right in.
