For Whom the Toilet Paper Rolls

Tracy Beckerman
Mon, 12 Jan 2026 21:00:00 -0800
Lifestyle

"Can you pick up some more tissues at the supermarket?" I asked my husband.

"I'm not going out right now," he replied. "Just use toilet paper."

I looked at him aghast.
Updated: Tue Jan 13, 2026

"Can you pick up some more tissues at the supermarket?" I asked my husband.

"I'm not going out right now," he replied. "Just use toilet paper."

I looked at him aghast.

"I can't do that," I said. "It'll scratch my nose."

"Does it scratch your butt?"

"No."

"Then why would it scratch your nose?" he asked.

"Hmmph," I hmmphed.

I shook my head. I got that they were both soft paper products, except one came in individual squares and the other came on a roll. However, I still felt that it was necessary to have different products for different parts of the body; the same way that napkins were for meals, and paper towels were for cleaning up. Using them for anything other than their intended purpose would be anarchy. I was pretty sure that if we started to use paper products wantonly and recklessly, a hole would open up in the universe and all the paper products would be sucked into a swirling vortex, leaving us with rocks for toilet paper, just like in the caveman days. It wouldn't be pretty, and it would definitely clog the toilets.

I could understand why this was difficult for my husband to see. He was a pragmatic, any-port-in-the-storm kind of guy. Also, I was having a hard enough time getting him to just CHANGE the empty toilet paper roll, much less understand that you don't use the toilet paper to blow your nose.

"You do realize that toilet paper and tissues are essentially the same thing," he said.

"They're not," I said.

"How do you figure?" he asked.

"Well, tissues are pretty straightforward, but toilet paper is complicated. First of all, there's the whole question of how you gather it. When you take some, do you wad it, or do you fold it? And then there's the whole one-ply versus two-ply issue and whether you want quilted or rippled. And don't get me started on which way to hang the toilet paper. Do you hang over or under? You don't have any of these problems with tissues."

He looked at me like I had toilet paper for brains.

"I wonder how you have room in your brain for the important things," he said.

"This is important," I replied. "Otherwise we'd be using rocks for toilet paper."

"I don't understand."

"It's OK. I've got you covered."

"OK, fine. Whatever," he said. "I'll get you some tissues when I go out, but first I have to go to the bathroom."

And with that, he exited to the downstairs bathroom and closed the door.

Several minutes later, he called out from the bathroom.

"Hey honey, do we have any more toilet paper? We're all out."

I knew we had more toilet paper, but it was upstairs and I didn't feel like going up, especially since he was the one who had left the roll with nary a square to spare.

"Hang on," I shouted back.

And then I slipped him a piece of paper towel under the door.