Help! I Wrote to Prudie for Advice and Kiley Reid Answered. (2024)

We’re helping you finish up your summer reading by asking some of our favorite authors to step in as Prudie for the day and give you advice. This is part of ourGuest Prudieseries.

Today’s columnist is Kiley Reid, the author of Come and Get It and Such A Fun Age, which was a New York Times Best Seller and longlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize. Her writing has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Playboy, The Guardian, and others.

We asked Reid to weigh in on filthy homes and pregnancy scares:

Dear Prudence,

My husband and I have been friends with a couple our entire married lives, about 25 years. When they bought their first house more than two decades ago, it was in an older part of town. Their house was small and crowded with beloved inherited pieces of furniture, books, and knick-knacks. It was also very dirty—greasy stove hood, mildew in the bathrooms, and dust and pet fur everywhere. I ascribed this to the older home having poor circulation and it being hard to keep up with the cleaning. These friends moved states five years ago.

We have visited them over long weekends in this newer home, which wasn’t as dirty, and I thought I had been correct about the old house being harder to keep clean. But now that they have been there for a while, this house is as dirty as their previous one. It has gotten to the point where we don’t want to stay with them, and we bring our own cleaning supplies for the bathroom to surreptitiously clean it. The best conversations always seem to happen spontaneously late at night and early in the morning, so staying in a hotel would lessen this closeness between our old friends. It is easier for us to travel to them, as they have a young teen and we are childless. Is there a way to gently help them keep their space clean, or do we have to give up on visiting them?

—Don’t Want to Sleep With Dust Bunnies

Dear Don’t Want to Sleep With Dust Bunnies,

Good Lord, you must get a hotel.

Let’s start with their old house.When you wrote “older house,” I read “lead poisoning” and when you said, “poor ventilation,” I heard, “mold problems.” You are being far too generous ascribing the age of home and poor circulation as the cause for this mess. Pet fur? Everywhere? I am not the one and you shouldn’t be either. If you ever ate anything cooked in this house, you probably have the right to receive restitution. And that probably goes for the new house, too. Same sh*t, different house.

To be clear, they are not bad people because they can’t keep a home clean. So many people don’t know how, and many that do just don’t have the time. Maybe your friends just have wildly different standards for what clean and comfortable means. But if you’re going to remain friends, you must stop this secret cleaning thing. Because 1. They will find out, and when they do, they will be hurt. And 2. You will absolutely grow to resent them. The more mess you clean, the more you uncover, and I honestly don’t want you to know what else they aren’t good at.

Get a hotel. You can get up early, pick up bagels and coffee, and be at their home when they wake up. As for nights, you can take turns not drinking so someone can drive, or depending on what city, you can take a cab. If you’ve been friends for over 25 years, this is one of those things that most likely won’t change. It’s a lot easier to change your accommodations than your friends’ cleaning habits.

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Dear Prudence,

My girlfriend and I are fighting about the break up of a pair of long-time mutual friends, “Jane” and “Jack.” Everyone thought Jane and Jack would end up married with the perfect white picket fence life. But then there was an unplanned pregnancy. Jack didn’t want it. Jane decided she did and was going to keep the baby despite the fact that she and Jack had made a long-term decision to abort if something like this happened.

Jack acted supportive but he was clearly stressed out and worried since they were living paycheck to paycheck. Jane ended up having an early miscarriage and Jack admitted to me that he only felt relief and that it was for the best. The problem is that Jane wouldn’t let it go and kept picking fights with Jack in public—saying things like he never wanted the baby and he would have been a bad dad. Jack finally snapped and asked Jane what she wanted him to say because he clearly wasn’t entitled to his own feelings about the subject. Jane cursed him out and Jack said they should just break up then. Jane got even more upset and it got very ugly and a lot of people chose sides. My girlfriend thinks that 100% of the problem was Jack and hates that I don’t.

I fully agree with a woman’s right to choose but I sympathize with how Jack got blindsided by Jane here. I would feel the same if my girlfriend did that to me (we have had similar conversations about what to do if she got pregnant). Since then, I have started to double up on birth control by using condoms. My girlfriend hates it and says it makes her feel like I don’t trust her. I love her but the entire lesson that I learned from this is that I don’t want to be a dad right now and need to be vigilant about that fact. Is this a situation that we can through or not?

—Not Kidding

Dear Not Kidding,

I have a feeling that Jack and Jane were not the perfect couple before this pregnancy occurred. If they were having big fights in public, then I’m left to imagine they’d been having bigger fights in private, and for a very long time. This “picket fence” label is also interesting because it suggests they were once headed toward those dated ideals: comfortable middle class living, large house, and kids. Jack and Jane were living paycheck to paycheck, and they never wanted children, which makes me wonder about the outside pressures they felt to stay together despite their strong differences of opinion.

No matter what we think we may do in certain situations, feelings on family planning can and do change. In this case, it meant that Jane and Jack were no longer compatible as partners, and that wasn’t anybody’s fault. I actually think that while watching the fallout of others can be difficult, it can also help illuminate our own situations. Real-life circ*mstances make you ask the same question that all good art should leave you with: What if that were me? What would I do?

One way you’ve responded is to wear condoms. You have every right to wear condoms without judgment. We don’t get to dictate people’s birth control choices. If your girlfriend began to feel uncomfortable about having sex without condoms, it would be your responsibility to wear them. The fact that there is tension around this double contraception leads me to think this is a symptom rather than the cause, much like the pregnancy in Jack and Jane’s relationship. Adult relationships are full of choices, promises, and unexpected change—the way you want to act in a given situation isn’t guaranteed when the time comes. Maybe this is the lesson you two are learning from Jane and Jack.

You ask whether this is a situation you can get through or not. I’m not quite sure. What’s lingering for me here is your girlfriend’s reaction to you wearing condoms. Sometimes, when I’m writing a particularly important scene, I try to write it several different ways, much like the way Kierkegaard approached Abraham and Isaac in the philosophical work Fear and Trembling. If I were going to zoom in on a scene about this Jack and Jane fallout, I would focus on this conversation between you and your girlfriend. One version would depict your girlfriend balking at the mention of condoms, saying things like, “Are you kidding me? Did Jack tell you to do this? I shouldn’t have to suffer because of Jack!” Another version might depict her seeking more information: “Are you freaked out by what happened to Jack and Jane? How long has this been on your mind? Did I say something to make you question my stance on kids?” And maybe in the third version, she’d be gentle but direct, “Hey, you know I don’t love condoms, but we can obviously wear them whenever you want. If there’s something I can do to make you feel more comfortable without them, let me know because I’m game.”

I’m not sure which of these versions is closest to the one that happened, but it may be wise to think of the response you would want a partner to give versus the one that you actually received. This is not to say that the condom conversation is emblematic of every future discussion you two will have when deciding vital lifestyle choices, but proper attention should be brought to the reaction of a partner when they turn the decisions that you make for your body into an issue solely about them.

—Kiley

When Carley Fortune Was Guest Prudie

I am getting married in a few months, and I’m so excited. I’m having the wedding of my dreams with the woman I love. It’s a fast turnaround for our engagement—about five or six months. I’m aware of how speedy this is. On top of that, we’ve only been together and known each other for a little over a year. My siblings (all older) are so excited for me—they’re married with kids. They love my fiancée. I also have glowing support from my parents and friends. The only trouble is my one sister, only a couple of years older who grew up as my best friend.