Can of worms?

Reader question:

Please explain “can of worms” in this passage: Both of us have been married before. She has a boy living with him. I have a girl. We are okay with each other’s can of worms. I think we’re going to be married.

My comments:

Relationships are a complicated issue and, here, it is likened to a can of worms.

A can of real, live worms, that is, like the can of worms an angler brings to use as fishing bait.

Now, imagine the angler accidentally lifts the lid of the can and all the creepy crawlies get out and start wiggling all over the place.

It’s a mess.

Yes, and it’s hard to deal with.

I mean, it’s probably impossible for the troubled angler to get all the worms back into the can again.

So, from this messy and terrifying – to the fainthearted – imagery derives the idiomatic meaning of “a can of worms”.

To wit, a mess and problematic situation that’s difficult, if not entirely impossible to deal with.

In our example, the speaker and his future wife – he thinks they’re going to be married – are both with a child from a previous marriage. Both carries a baggage, so to speak, and since neither’s previous marriage panned out well – ending in divorce – you can imagine they both have a lot of troublesome and perhaps traumatic experiences to recover from.

Luckily, as well as happily for these two, they don’t mind each other’s can of worms or problems.

He thinks they can overcome all of those problems. He thinks they’ll get married.

And hopefully, I may add, live happily ever after.

All right. Let’s read a few media examples of “can of worms”, which is American in origin:

1. The Harvey Weinstein sexual harassment scandal has opened a can of worms for global cinema and Hollywood star Will Smith says it has been “bizarre” for him to come to terms with the dark side of showbiz.

Blaming his naivety, the 49-year-old actor said the fact that people like Weinstein existed in the world filled him with bewilderment.

“The whole situation has been bizarre for me... As I’m hearing these things people would do like... I just don’t know who would do (something) like that!

“And I don’t know, I’m naive but (you) schedule a meeting with someone and the person shows up and like you’re in a bathrobe! I just don’t know those guys. I have male friends but no...” Smith said in a group interview.

The actor is currently in the city for the India premiere of his Netflix film Bright, accompanied by the director of the movie, David Ayer.

As a father to teenage daughter, Willow, Smith raised concern over women safety and security in these times.

“My 17-year-old daughter, who grew up with men she trusts and really does not even comprehend the predatory idea,” he added.

- Will Smith on Harvey Weinstein: The whole situation has been bizarre for me, WIONNews.com, December 18, 2017.

2. Looking back, Rich Paul doing podcasts seemed like a good idea, until it wasn’t. The Klutch Sports Group founder and CEO recently opened a can of worms with his commentary on the “Game Over” podcast, prompting several NBA personalities to implore him to stop the madness.

One of the more vocal critics is current NBA on NBC analyst Austin Rivers. Rivers firmly believes that Paul talking about other players on the pod with Max Kellerman does more harm than good.

Paul and Kellerman started the talk show sometime in the second week of December 2025. It’s still not as big as the other basketball-related podcasts, such as “All the Smoke” and “The Old Man and the Three,” in terms of following, but it’s far more incendiary, especially when RP speaks on players or propagates trade rumors.

For instance, many feel Paul was way off line when he pitched a hypothetical trade on the show, suggesting that the Los Angeles Lakers send Austin Reaves to the Memphis Grizzlies for Jaren Jackson, Jr. It was so outrageous that JJJ initially thought it was AI or DeepFake.

Rivers, who played in the league for 11 seasons, implored the NBA’s most potent agent to stop before things get out of hand.

“First of all, why do you have a podcast anyway?” Rivers rhetorically asked on the “Off Guard” podcast with Pausha Haghighi. “I don’t get it. I have nothing against Rich, but I don’t understand why you have a podcast… You’re not a player. I don’t know any other agents sitting there on the mic talking.”

For Rivers, Paul has no business doing a podcast because it complicates matters. He is the agent for the NBA’s most popular athlete, LeBron James, and some of his thoughts reflect on LBJ, which is a distraction.

- Austin Rivers calls on Rich Paul to stop doing podcasts: “I don’t know any other agents on the mic talking”, BasketballNetwork.net, January 16, 2026.

3. The Trump administration’s stated justifications for going to war with Iran were already a jumbled and self-contradictory mess.

But on Tuesday, Trump made it even worse – laying waste to the administration’s confusing explanation from Monday.

Just a day after Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed that Iran posed an imminent threat – because it would respond to imminent attacks from Israel by striking US forces – Trump went with an entirely different explanation: that Iran was going to launch preemptive strikes against the US on its own.

“It was my opinion that they were going to attack first,” the president said.

And with that, the botched rollout of the Trump administration’s case for war enters yet another chapter.

Rubio had already turned plenty of heads with his claims on Monday.

“We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action,” Rubio said. “We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”

This was problematic for a couple of reasons.

For one, it was different from the explanations for why Iran posed an imminent threat that had been offered in the days before the war began. Trump special envoy Steve Witkoff, who was leading negotiations with Tehran, initially claimed Iran was “probably a week away” from having nuclear bomb-making material. Then Trump in his State of the Union address last week claimed Iran would “soon” have the ability to strike the United States with an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).

But those claims didn’t square with either US intelligence or with the administration’s past claims about having “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program just eight months ago.

Additionally, Rubio’s explanation made it sound a little like Israel was the tail wagging the dog – that the US was having its decisions about going to war dictated by an ally. The Trump administration on Tuesday set about trying to dispel that notion, saying Rubio’s explanation was not about why the US went to war, period, but why the US went to war when it did.

But Trump has now taken exception to that narrative, scrambling his administration’s messaging yet again. When asked Tuesday whether Israel had forced his hand, he claimed it was Iran that was about to strike.

“It was my opinion that they were going to attack first,” Trump said of Iran. “They were going to attack if we didn’t do it. They were going to attack first. I felt strongly about that.”

He added: “And based on the way the negotiation was going, I think they were going to attack first, and I didn’t want that to happen. So if anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand.”

Trump then seemed to point to possible disagreements within his administration on the subject.

“We thought, and I thought maybe more so than most – I could ask Marco – but I thought we were going to have a situation where we were going to be attacked,” Trump said. “They were getting ready to attack Israel. They were getting ready to attack others. You’re seeing that right now. … So I think I was right about that.”

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth chimed in shortly after on social media, saying Trump’s explanation was “100% correct.”

And after Trump’s remarks, Rubio on Tuesday afternoon denied that he had attributed any part of the rationale to following Israel. He instead lined up behind the president’s latest explanation.

“The bottom line is this: The president determined we were not going to get hit first. It’s that simple, guys. We are not going to put American troops in harm’s way,” Rubio told reporters on Capitol Hill.

It’s difficult to overstate just how much this contradicts Rubio’s version of events and opens up a new can of worms.

The idea that Iran was about to strike against the US would be the easiest and cleanest justification, if it were substantiated. But that’s notably not the justification that Rubio – or anybody else – offered, at least not before Tuesday.

- The rationale for striking Iran was already a mess. Trump just made it worse.CNN.com, March 4, 2026.

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About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.

（作者：张欣）