People always say that love is an unfathomable mystery no mortal can fully understand. But they’re wrong. Love is like a tapeworm. It’s invasive, sucks the life out of you, makes you take drugs, makes you walk funny, gives you a fever, and causes you to spend a lot of time in the bathroom crying.

Of course, there’s also much to be said in favor of love. And Shakespeare, as everyone knows, said most of it. Who can forget the Bard’s inspiring words:

Forsooth, mine own blinded love-seared crimson muscle-pump! Be still, internal idiot! Blast thee for thine heavenly, thrice-cursed flannigenans, ‘ere by my failieth gruen beaierurnaut yon glibbet! Dringlie-yay, dringlie-yay! Mort!

But that’s Shakespeare. He was a genius. The rest of us just have to struggle along as best we can.

Speaking of sex. The relationship between love and sex can be very confusing. For men, anyway. Not so much for women. Women are pretty clear on the idea that love and sex are—or at least certainly should be—inextricably bound. But men are … well men. Which means they’re inclined to be … well, men. Which means they’re inclined to be rude. In fact, asking a man to stop being rude about sex is like asking a bear to stop being hairy about its body. It’s just not in the cards. To men, sex is rude. You take the rudeness out of sex, and men start shrugging and wondering what’s on TV.

So, that’s a problem .

If anyone out there knows the solution to this problem — if anyone can or has figured out how to make men and women think of sex in the same way — please email that answer to me. Thank you.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

One thing I’ve learned in my many years of falling just short of being correct about pretty much anything having to do with romance, sex, or love, is that women do not think sex is as funny as men do. Men see sex as a never-ending source of first-rate yucks yuks. There’s so precious little about sex that isn’t funny, is why. Unless you’re a woman. Then you probably don’t find sex all that hilarious. At least not in a good way. A woman laughing during sex is rarely, if ever, a thing to be desired. It usually means that she’s either spontaneously reacting to the existential irony of her current mortification, or she’s got one eye on a Will Ferrell movie. Either way, once she bursts out laughing, it’s time for her lover to excuse himself, leave, and not come back until he’s spent fourteen years becoming an enlightened Hindu swami who no longer cares if his sexual techniques inspire hilarity in his partners.

Of course, it’s completely understandable why so many women take sex and romance a lot more seriously than do so many men. After all, a man who has just had sex is very often compelled to eat a ham sandwich and watch television. On the other hand, a woman who has just had sex is very often compelled to nine months later have a baby. And while it certainly can be difficult to get the exactly perfect amount of mustard on a ham sandwich, challenge-wise the two aren’t really comparable. So a woman has to be careful. She can’t afford to sleep with a man who won’t take seriously his responsibility to afterward stay and feed her ham sandwiches.

And men, wanting, after all, to do the right thing, do often stick around for years and years following the Big Bond, transferring their genetic propensity for wandering into incessantly switching TV channels, being chronically incapable of making up their minds, throwing inexpiable temper tantrums, and dying four years earlier than women from the constant stress of having to hide their porn.

But back to the timeless allure of romance.

Ah, romance. If there’s one thing upon which we can all agree, it’s that nothing says romance like a big bouquet of flowers that stays fresh for about three days before it starts attracting gnats and smelling like fetid death.

Unless you first sprinkle into that vase some of that Prolong-A-Stalk powder that comes strapped to the stalks of new flowers. Then you can get about a whole week of not-dead-seeming flowers.

Of course, then you have to stand there stirring water in a vase, which is like eating a cupcake with chopsticks, or putting two different shoes on, or trying to conduct a philharmonic symphony with a banana. I dunno.

My poor wife. We’ve been married for thirty years now now, and not a day goes by that I don’t count that as an extremely valid reason to take pity on her.