The Phone Call on the Sixth Night of a Business Trip: Let's Put the Words "Japan Tengsu" on the Table

A reader asked me: I'm on a business trip, and halfway through a phone call with my partner at night, we got into a fight. Out of nowhere she threw out, "You're not looking at that kind of stuff again, are you?" How should I respond? My answer is blunt: don't rush to explain what you were looking at. First, find out exactly what she's worried about. A lot of arguments aren't about those four words—they're about when you searched, the hesitation you never voiced, and the whole storyline she filled in on her own.

I'm an engineer running production lines in Southeast Asia, and I spend about a third of the year in hotels. The sixth night is usually the emotional low point. During the day I'm chased around the factory floor by yield rates, and at night I come back to a room with nothing but a bottle of mineral water and a stack of meeting materials for the next day. That night, when the video call connected, my wife was clearing the kids' dinner bowls, and the background noise was loud. I said three sentences and she didn't catch any of them. By the fourth, she just propped up her phone and went to do the dishes. Something in me snapped, and I blurted out, "Never mind, you're not even listening anyway."

When she came back, her face had already changed. She said that the week before, while tidying my desk, she'd seen a bunch of tabs open on my tablet—titles full of words like men's health, stamina, energy. She didn't ask, but she filed it away. What worried her wasn't what I'd bought—it was whether something was wrong with my body and I wouldn't tell her, preferring to look it up alone in the middle of the night. I wanted to argue back, but then I realized I really hadn't mentioned those tabs to her, because I myself wasn't even sure what I was searching for.

During that period my search history was a mess. It started because for several weeks in a row, my energy dropped fast during afternoon meetings. I thought it was jet lag, then I suspected it was age. I started with keywords, typed a string, deleted it, tried a few other phrasings. What popped up ranged from nutritional supplements and sleep adjustments to all kinds of names that sounded impressive. One set of words kept showing up, so I copied it onto a sticky note, thinking I'd look into it more once I got home. She saw that note later, and that's what set off the fire in that video call.

The day after the fight, while waiting for a car in the hotel lobby, I unfolded the sticky note and suddenly realized the problem wasn't the words themselves—it was how I was asking. The whole time I'd been asking "which one is better," but I never first asked "what exactly am I worried about." So I changed my approach. I wrote down my recent energy levels, hours of sleep, and cups of coffee, one by one. I circled those words on the sticky note and added a note beside them: "Not sure what this is yet—don't buy." That night on the video call, I didn't explain anything. I just shared my screen with her.

After she looked, she was quiet for a moment, then said she'd actually looked it up too. What she'd typed into the search bar was "Japan Tengsu," trying to figure out whether it was medicine, food, or that in-between kind of thing with vague packaging. The two of us sat there facing the screen, reading the pages we found out loud, one by one: some listed ingredients, some described how to use it, some were entire pages about how fast it works. We weren't equipped to judge which claims were true, but we were equipped to judge which ones sounded like they were rushing you to place an order.

That night we agreed on three things. First, neither of us orders anything before I get home, and any page asking you to leave a phone number or add a messaging app gets closed immediately. Second, photograph and save the ingredients, warnings, and manufacturing and import information on the packaging, and once I'm back, take those images to ask a professional—not strangers online. Third, if this kind of thing requires a prescription in Taiwan, then go through the proper channels and don't get it from sources of unknown origin. She added one more thing: first confirm what it actually is, then decide whether to touch it.

After I got home, we really did go to a clinic. I brought the sticky note, the screenshots, and my sleep and routine records from that period. I wasn't asking the doctor to endorse any product—I just wanted to know where I should start with testing. The doctor asked about sleep, stress, and exercise habits, and reminded me that a lot of what's said online lumps together things of completely different natures. He told me to first make a clear list of the supplements I was already taking. Walking out of the exam room, my wife said this was way more useful than the three hours we spent fighting on the phone. That sticky note ended up taped in front of my desk, reminding me: ask the right question first, then look for the answer.

If you find yourself in a similar conversation, my suggestion is to swap "Why were you looking this up?" for "Let's put the information on the table and look at it together." Looking things up isn't shameful. What's shameful is making your partner guess about your health from your search history. As for those tempting-sounding names, first confirm what category they belong to, whether the source is clear, and whether they need professional evaluation—then decide your next step. What a partner usually wants isn't a guarantee. It's that you're willing to let her be part of the process of figuring it out.