Eeeewww, I Mean, I Love You.

My niece just got married, I really like the young man and have every confidence that they will have a very happy life together. They both have that humble, bashful sweetness that is so mysterious and enchanting to me. On practically the eve of their wedding I gave my niece possibly the most critical advice I can bestow on any married couple.

Fart in front of each other, before the wedding if possible, if not, as soon as you can after. It is golden advice.

Dave and I were going swimming together one sun sparkled day of our courtship and I noticed that he had a zit on his back. Some normal people might be able to look away and find something else to focus on, but I have never claimed to be normal. Do you remember the "Moley moley moley" scene in Austin Powers? Try standing in my eye line while sporting a giant whitehead and you will probably get a reenactment. It's not that I think your gross for having a whitehead, it's that I'm gross because I really want to pop it, or I want you to pop it, but for the love, someone please pop it!

Anyways.

Dave had a zit. I said "Ooh, you have a little zit, hold still and I'll get it". He stood still, maybe slightly mortified, I don't know, muttering something about it being a "sun blister" (awe, cute!) and I popped it. You know how you never want to clean your own house, but when you're cleaning someone else's it's oddly satisfying? Well I LOVE cleaning my own house! and this was even better! Thus began a satisfying relationship for me and a painful one for Dave. Little did he realize that this was only the tip of my really gross iceberg.

A few days later, he tackled me around the waist and threw me on the couch, landing on my stomach. Yup, that's right. I frogged (as I was forced to call it until I was twelve). Laugh with me not at me. But after that moment it was on. No more of the single person stomach aches for us, there was finger pulling, questions posed of whether or not one of us was trying to smuggle a duck in our pants, Dave would sometimes hold my hand so he could pull me behind him and laugh maniacally. We were in our own disgusting little heaven reserved only for us. I knew I had found my soul mate.

Things got worse, or better, after our marriage. There has been tandem bathroom usage since our honeymoon, that is until one of us has to tap out. A favorite McKay family motto is the Family that Picks Together, Sticks Together. (I need to cross stitch that on a pillow for our front room, or perhaps work it into a coat of arms at some point.)

Call us what you will, but there are advantages, most of them revolve around the fact that grosser days are in our future, and yours, whether any of us like it or not. Chances are that you will at one point be the adult diaper changer or changee and hiding normal bodily function from your spouse is just setting yourself up for further mortification on that dreaded day, whereas for us Dave will just turn lovingly to me and say "Pull my finger", and I'll guffaw and say "oh, you" as I pull out a fresh Depends.

But you don't even need to think that far ahead, some of the mothers out there can back me up, but if I had spent the honeymoon years of my marriage scared to let my husband in on my secret that sometimes I need to poop like every other mammal on the planet we never could have gotten through the experience of water breaking, baby crowning, placenta delivery, and, for some, actual pooping that is the labor experience.

It might have been my parents divorcing the same year I was married, but I planned things this way. I remember thinking very clearly that I didn't want Dave to have any surprises, I wanted him to know what he was getting so that if he didn't want me he couldn't claim later it was because he didn't realize what I was like. He knew exactly what I was like.

I was nasty, and I continue to deliver.

So for those of you out there embarking on the adventure of a new relationship I say to you; set the bar low (brow), those grumblies in your tumm-blies you're feeling don't have to last forever. A relationship in which you don't feel judged after eating some bad tacos frees up a lot of room to play. And for that matter, golden advice doesn't only have to be reserved for dating. I was going on about this to a friend when she said "you know what, my best friend and I were just acquaintances before we got sick at the same time in a Safeway after eating at Mongolian Grill, now we're like sisters."