Vulnerability

Start with the spouse, because there is a real and rather painful case study available. When the American space programme selected its first astronauts, it acquired, as a by-product, seven wives, and it had a use for them. The families were sold as a package — an exclusive contract with a magazine, the money split between them, in exchange for a particular story: the calm, proud, supportive woman at the front door, hair done, children arranged, saying that she had every confidence. The women were coached. They gave the interviews. They stood on lawns while their husbands sat on top of experimental rockets, and they were expected to be photographed being serene about it, and to keep being serene about it when a colleague's husband did not come back.

What the arrangement could not accommodate was any of the actual content of their lives: the fear, which was rational and constant; the absences; the other women, which were an open secret in a programme that badly needed its heroes to look wholesome; the fact that the whole family's social standing, income and future now depended on a man doing something that might kill him, so that no wife could reasonably ask him to stop. Almost all of those marriages ended.

Nothing about that story requires spaceflight. It requires only a person whose public role is heroic, an institution with an interest in the image, and a family conscripted into maintaining it. A superpowered individual's partner would be in exactly that position, with two additions: she would be a permanent security liability, since anyone wishing to influence him has an obvious point of entry; and she would be, in the most literal sense, the weak point in his defences, which is a thing to know about oneself at breakfast.

That is the second problem, and it is the one that would actually structure the family's life. Everyone he loves is a lever. This is not paranoia; it is the ordinary calculus applied to anyone who cannot be reached directly, and the historical record is unambiguous — judges, prosecutors, informants, the wealthy in certain countries at certain times, all have had to think about their children's routes to school. The consequences are dreary and well understood by the people who live with them: no predictable patterns, no photographs, a different name at the school gate, and a slow attrition of ordinary sociability, because every new friendship is a new person to assess.

And it cuts the other way too, which is worse. If he knows that his family can be used against him, then so does he, and a man who has understood that his affections are a vulnerability has been handed the most corrosive possible reason to hold people at a distance — and the reason is good. He is not being cold. He is being correct. The cruelty of the arrangement is that the protective move and the damaging move are the same move.

from How to Think Seriously About Superheroes (2026)