Love to Death

A man goes to his doctor for his annual physical complaining of all kinds of mysterious ailments -- lack of sleep, no drive, very little appetite, nervous, etc. After a complete exam, the doctor can find nothing physically wrong and suspects the man is suffering from depression. The two had been friends for many years, so the doctor did not hesitate to ask the man about his personal life. "Well, if you must know," said the patient, "I cannot stand my wife. She's made my life unbearable. I fantasize all the time about killing that damn witch. In fact, if you are truly my friend, you'll give me some kind of untraceable poison to give her, so I may end my misery."
The doctor explained that not only was that illegal, it would in fact, violate his oath to save lives. He said, "Besides, you'll get life in prison yourself, at best. I'll tell ya what though, I can give you this powerful aphrodisiac to slip into her coffee. You can then 'love her to death'.  No jury in the world is going to convict a man for loving his wife too much. She'll be gone in a month at best."  The man blessed the doctor, went home and started putting the love elixir in his wife's coffee the very next morning. Three weeks later, the doctor hasn't heard a word from his friend, and becomes concerned. After office hours, he stops by his friend's house to see if all is well. He finds his friend sitting on the sun deck, wrapped in a blanket, even though it's a warm Spring day.  The man's face was gaunt and pale, he'd lost Lord knows how much weight and looked terrible. The doctor asked, "What the Hell happened ???"
The man said, "I followed your advice to the letter. That woman and I made love like a pair of crazed rabbits, day and nite." Then, he chuckled, causing a terrible wheeze. Just then the wife appeared from inside the house. All slim and trim and dressed in tennis clothes; smiling, she said she was off for a few sets of tennis. As she leaped into her new sports car, her husband cackled and said to the doctor, "Look at that dumb crazy bitch. She hasn't a lick of sense. If she only knew she has less than a week to live she wouldn't be so God damn frisky."

Money to Buy Meat

One day, a wife goes up to her husband and asks for twenty dollars to buy meat. "Are you crazy?" says the husband, who pulls her over to a mirror. "Let me show you something? This twenty-dollar bill is mine. The one in the mirror is yours. Get it?" The wife nods. The next day, the husband returns home to find a freezer full of meat. Angry, he asks his wife about it. She pulls him over to the mirror and lifts up her skirt. "See the one in the mirror? That's yours. This one is the butcher's."

CHOCOLATE

Chocolate is God's way of reminding men how inadequate they are. I am vividly confronted with this fact every time my wife and I go out to a restaurant. When it gets to dessert, my wife usually orders the most chocolate-saturated dessert possible. It's the one called "Unstoppable Double-Fudge Chocolate Mudslide Explosion" or some such thing. I always wonder why anyone would want to eat anything that promises a catastrophic natural disaster in your mouth. The dark brown monstrosity arrives at the table, and my wife takes the first bite. Before the fork is even removed from her mouth, a small moan escapes her lips. Her eyes, previously perfectly aligned, first cross slightly and then faze completely, pupils dilating in pure chocolate pleasure before the eyelids clamp down in ecstasy. The hand not holding the fork clenches into a fist and starts pounding the table. The silverware rattles. After about six minutes of this, she finally manages to swallow the bite, realign her eyes, and take the next shuttle back from whatever transcendental plane she's been visiting. Slowly, her sphere of consciousness expands to include me, her husband, her life-long mate, her presumed partner in all things ecstatic. "Hey, this is pretty good," she'll say. "You want some?" No, I don't. I want nothing to do with an object that does to my wife in one bite what I've worked for an entire relationship to achieve. It wouldn't do any good, anyway. Men just don't have the same relationship with chocolate that women do. It's not even close. I wandered around the office today and asked men -- "Chocolate. Your thoughts?" -- and the result was always the same. First, a confused look as to why they're being asked about something so trivial, and then some lame, obvious statement: "Uh...it's brown?" Ask women the same question, and you get responses like "The ONLY food group," "ESSENTIAL to life as we know it," and the ultimate casual swipe at every member of the Y-chromosome brigade, "better than sex." Ouch. Some women will try to make up for that last one by quickly adding that chocolate is supposed to be an aphrodisiac. Uh-huh. Chocolate certainly increases desire; problem is the desire is usually for more chocolate. The best a guy can do is buy a box of chocolates and hope he'll be considered somewhere between the cherry truffle and the strawberry nougat. Don't get me wrong. Guys like chocolate just fine; it's just not essential to life as we know it. Respiration is essential to life as we know it; chocolate is simply one of those nice little bonuses you get. We won't usually pass it up if it's offered, but I don't know too many guys who would get substantially worked up if it were to suddenly disappear from the face of the earth (ironic in a way, as back in the days of the Aztecs, only men were allowed to have the stuff). When I eat a chocolate dessert, I enjoy it, yes. My world view doesn't narrow to include only the plate that it's on. Maybe we're missing something. On the other hand, we don't have to pick up our silverware from the floor after we're done with our tiramisu. Life is about trade-offs like that. All I know is that come Valentine's Day, chocolate will be among the things I offer my wife. I can't truly appreciate it, but I can truly appreciate what it does for her. Which is close enough.
copyright(c) John Scalzi John Scalzi is a columnist and humorist living in Virginia. For more columns and essays, visit his website: www.scalzi.com