The home wrecker
Dealing with a thoughtless houseguest (and her underwear), plus letting your freak flag fly.
I’ve always had a great relationship with my husband’s sister, but she has been visiting us for a week now and is getting on my nerves. She takes things from my medicine cabinet, scatters her “delicates” around the house to dry, turns the TV on during dinner, etc. If there were just one annoying behavior, I would tell her, but I am continually taken aback. (I wouldn’t have thought to tell her not to look at my mail, but there she was flipping through the pile on the kitchen counter.) She is staying another week and is already talking about coming back. How do I approach her about her general cluelessness?
S.M. / Acton
You can’t. When dealing with an adult who seems to have a global deficit in understanding, you can usually assume that if she could figure out what she was doing wrong, she wouldn’t be doing it. (For more on this sad phenomenon, see “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments,” published by David Dunning and Justin Kruger in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.)
Two weeks is far too long to entertain houseguests unless you have a very large house or your guests have consuming business in town that keeps them busy and away for a good part of the day. Keep future visits shorter, and keep them sweeter by directing your sister-in-law’s energy in useful ways. The gracious hostess doesn’t require guests to wash dishes in recompense for their meals, but you can certainly ask a relative to fetch a missing ingredient for dinner from the store or watch the kids for an hour while you run errands.
Contain the visits, direct the energy, and block annoying actions pleasantly but firmly. If you wind up asking her to please not do things a dozen times a day, so be it: Every single time, make the request in the same calm, vaguely bemused tone, and she probably won’t even notice how frequently she’s being checked. Phrase these requests, as much as possible, as positives rather than negatives (for example, don’t say, “Please don’t dry your panties on top of the dog’s crate,” but “Here’s a drying rack; if you want to hand-wash your things you can dry them in the bathroom”).
Family members sometimes invite me to country clubs with dress codes requiring all body art to be taken out or covered up. If these are the rules, I follow them. But my relatives do not like body art at all and have often asked me to cover up at informal places as well. I comply to keep from getting in an argument. Are they out of line in requesting that I hide my body art just because they don’t like it? Should I stand my ground and let my true self show?
P.O. / Jacksonville, Florida
Yes to both questions. Your body is your own, and you needn’t cover up your tattoos or remove your piercings merely because other people don’t care for them. (I admire your open-mindedness about the country clubs; can’t say I’d be equally tolerant myself.) Body modifications can disturb or even disgust people on first encounter, but there’s nothing people can’t get used to. After a quarter-hour, your self-decorations will seem as humdrum as eyeglasses.
Civilized people must avoid offending others by, for instance, insufficient hygiene, but we are not required to conform to other people’s aesthetic preferences. After all, are your relatives’ style choices always pleasing to your hipster eye? Have you no mulleted cousins, no UGG-clomping sister, no neck-bearded uncle, no aunts in bedazzled sweaters? If you don’t fashion-police them, they shouldn’t police you, either.
Miss Conduct is Robin Abrahams, a Cambridge-based writer with a PhD in psychology.
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