And I say that as somebody whose spouse got a tattoo of their wedding date on his ring finger.

(Which was not my idea [much less my command]. I found it sweet, if a little bit fate-tempting, like isn’t this like painting on a target for the universe? That’s how this kind of stuff happens, you get your lover’s name inked on you and immediately, as if that caused it, she’s banging the fellow who does the landscaping.)

(Nevertheless, it was sweet. And nobody does our landscaping. We live in a condo. Landscaping is when I throw out the dead plants I forgot to water.)

This is gross. Look, marriage is hard enough without throwing all this cutesy bullshit at it designed to make you hate each other. The world is designed to make you hate each other and yourselves already, what with the weather and the economy and how we can’t build a washing machine that doesn’t at some point make a noise like someone stuck a squirrel in the gears, so let’s keep pimping out this adversarial view of relationships where you’re locked in a struggle to the death. Who has time for that shit? Jesus, no wonder nobody gets married now until they’re like 35, because it takes you that long to jettison all the cultural crap you’ve been loaded up with, like this idea about “preventing” cheating somehow, and decide if you really want to do this after all.

A.