Help! My Wife Commits the Ultimate Faux Pas Every Time We Visit Someone’s Home.

Dear Prudence is Slate’s advice column. Submit questions here.

My wife tends to do something in other people’s homes that’s a complete invasion of privacy.

She rifles through bathroom cabinets when we are guests in people’s homes and loves to discuss what she finds. She ignores my admonitions to stay out of others’ stuff. Is it time to give friends and relatives a heads-up to shut this down for good?

Dear Mind Your Business,

Your wife’s behavior falls into the Very Bad But Also Pretty Common category. These aren’t the most official numbers, but in the past, sources have reported that 40 percent of people dig through the medicine cabinets of their hosts. In one poll, half of Americans said they thought this kind of snooping was fine. Again, I’m not presenting peer-reviewed research here, but these are two data points that confirm my sense that your wife is not out of control compared to the rest of society. What she’s doing is common, and anyone who invites her over probably knows that. The trope of rifling through someone’s collection of lotions and medicine bottles exists for a reason.

I’m actually a little bit more concerned about why you want to inform your friends and family. I always worry a bit when someone brings the energy of calling a manager or filing a police report to their romantic partner. An important part of relationships is that you respect each other—and I don’t mean treating each other with respect. I mean sincerely thinking, “I admire the way she makes her way through the world, and I think she makes good choices.” That’s missing here, as is another key element: “I lean toward taking her side and wanting her to be OK because I love her, even if I’d be more critical of the behavior from someone else.” You should want to give your wife the benefit of the doubt! If you default instead to protecting the world from her pretty harmless behavior, humiliating her in the process, that’s a problem that monitoring her medicine cabinet snooping habits won’t fix.

My family is finding the behavior of my brother increasingly difficult to handle. I’m a few years older than him and we used to be really close. We had a tough childhood at times; our parents divorced when we were young, and our mother is no longer around. I settled down quite early with my wife (we have three kids) but he used to be a bit of a tearaway, going to a lot of parties and generally enjoying his life. This all changed about five years ago when he met his now-wife. She’s a few years older, had a decent career, and seemed nice.