Christoph Niemann

In the future, when astronauts are voyaging at close to the speed of light to other solar systems and gone for decades at a time, should their spouses have to wait for them?

No, no, no, no, no. Absolutely not, and let me tell you why. Or rather, let Mary Roach, best-selling author of Packing for Mars, tell you why.

Think of the Apollo astronauts, Roach told me. “Basically every one of those marriages ended in an ugly divorce with a nasty tell-all memoir.” And those missions took only 12 days at most! (Plus a few months of isolated training.) The problem, Roach went on, was that “the whole era was very stage-managed. The wives became a publicity tool for NASA. They had a contract with Life magazine and basically had to be happy and smiley and serve cookies, but really, on the inside, they were like, ‘Fuck you! You’ve been gone for six months, and I haven’t seen you, and now you’re back and doing ticker-tape parades, and people think you’re a hero, but you don’t care about your kids, and you’re fucking everything that walks, and I still have to be on television smiling in my Pucci outfit.”

Space exploration creates a toxic mix of public scrutiny and public worship that inevitably promotes resentment in the earthbound half of the couple and feelings of insufferable cockiness in the half that went zooming around in space. And in this scenario, Roach points out, the difficulties would be even more excruciating—for several reasons. First, forget Life magazine. Imagine for a second—extrapolating from the devolution of reality television in just the past 20 years—what kind of crassly demented, all-access reality show there’d be a century or two from now about the spouses of the first astronauts to light out for other solar systems! It would be unbearable:

My heart aches when I imagine those poor astronaut wives and husbands cowering by the small, cold-fusion furnaces of their skypartment buildings, carving the network’s tracking devices from their necks with a Rabbit brand laser corkscrew just to steal a moment’s peace from those abusive, genetically modified spider paparazzi.

And more important, Roach points out, the astronaut who comes back from voyaging to another galaxy will still be relatively young and fit and good-looking (because they were traveling at near the speed of light, so from their perspective the trip didn’t take that long), while the spouse back home will have aged and withered, having waited around on a planet that just kept spinning indifferently. It’s a recipe for disaster, basically. And betrayal. And pain.

So summing up: no.

When my kids are on a FaceTime call with their grandma, can I ignore them and go about my business, even though Mom can see me?

Standard Mr. Know-It-All procedure is to kick tough questions like this up to the highest possible authority, so I called a real-life grandmother I know. “Hey! It’s Jon from California!” the grandmother shouted in an exuberantly performative way, as though I’d just walked onto the set of her late-night variety show. (This, I eventually learned, was for the benefit of a woman named Carmella, who was there cleaning the apartment.) I laid out the situation and asked the grandmother if she’d be willing to help. Yes, of course, she said—anything. “You can tell them you got a consultation from Dear Bubbie,” she said with a laugh. (That’s a play on “Dear Abby”—I thought it was a pretty good joke.)

But when I relayed your question to the grandmother, the grandmother clammed up. “You’re really putting me under pressure here, you know,” the grandmother said. She went silent.

I worried that maybe I’d foisted too much on her. Then she said something very softly, as though it were obvious—as though it were unthinkable and even a little disrespectful that this hadn’t occurred to me or you already, as though only the grandmother, perched further up that high tower of time, could see that there’d been an atrocious lapse in compassion here. “Well,” she said, “why hasn’t he asked his parents how they feel about it?” And that, as far as the grandmother was concerned, was that. “Give the girls a hug,” she added. “I love you.” And let me tell you, it felt so good to say it back.

What’s the smoothest not-weird way to let someone know, as I come out of a public restroom, that the smell was there when I went in?

Oh Lord, it’s just impossible, right? Anything you can think to say—like “I’m not sure you want to go in there,” with a suave, slow wave of your hand in front of your nose—would only backfire and incriminate you further. Even a simple and forthright “Sorry, it wasn’t me!” sounds exactly like what a 6-year-old would say in a pathetic attempt to shift the blame. You could take a breezier, jokey tack—“Whoa, something really happened in there!”—but that would inevitably get misread as you expressing genuine astonishment at the reeking profundity of your own bowel movement. (And I’m aware of all the pitfalls because—I am not afraid to admit this—I’ve beta-tested these solutions in the field. Let no one question my commitment to Knowing It All!)

So here’s what I’m proposing:

I’ve tried to keep this answer short— roughly, I hope, wallet-sized when it’s laid out in the magazine. Cut it out. Make copies. Laminate the copies. Next time you open a bathroom door—stepping out of that cloud of consequences and shame that someone else has saddled you with—hand one of the cards to the person waiting outside. You will be tempted to give a little shrug as you walk past, but the card will explain everything. So keep your head high. Trust the card. Let the world know you’re on top. You, my friend, are no number two.