The Sh#% Your Parents Should Tell You

How Do You Know It's True Love?

There is one reason, and one reason only, to get married and have a family: to have people you can fart in front of.

Yeah, I know that sounds more like crap (pun most definitely intended) than a pearl of wisdom, but I'm actually quite serious. Be warned. You'll have most of humanity telling you differently. They'll tell you that marriage is all about falling in love and finding your soul mate and feeling complete. They'll tell you that to keep your marriage fresh and exciting you shouldn't be so crude as to let 'em brazenly rip in front of your beloved, that you should maintain the alluring mystique that you are a flatulence-free beauty that also does not sweat, poop, belch, or grow hair anywhere but on your head. Well, I'm here to tell you that whoever adheres to that philosophy is probably uptight, repressed, bloated, and neoconservative. And I'm pretty damn sure you don't want to be any of those things.

First of all, contrary to popular opinion, love and marriage aren't about feelings. Feelings come and go. They have their own tides; they change in response to hormones, weather, smells, thoughts, kitten videos, and myriad other forces beyond your control. For this reason, feelings can rarely be trusted. For example, you will find that even though you're with someone whom you love and respect and seems totally right for you, there will come times when they don't "feel" right for you, when they don't make you happy, when they're dancing on your very last nerve and if they say even one more syllable about the way you do the damn dishes you'll give them a lesson in who's being irrational. But does that mean you should dump that person because right now they're annoying the bejeebers out of you? Hmmm...Does it...?? No...no, it doesn't. Those feelings will pass, if you let them, and others will come, both positive and negative, pleasant and unpleasant, and few will truly reflect the complexity of your love for this person.

Second, love and marriage aren't about finding someone to complete you. You are already complete. No one can make you more or less than you are. This isn't to say that you know everything you need to know or that you don't have a whole lot of growing to do (hell, I've still got tons to do, and I'm a bazillion years older than you are). Life, you will find, is an unending process of discovering your completeness and allowing it to manifest itself in the many ways gifted to you.

Just like you don't need someone to complete you, your partner doesn't need you to complete them either. Contrary to popular belief, none of us is here to make other people feel good about themselves. You are not a bipedal Xanax that your partner can use to restore their waning confidence or fix their raging insecurities. In fact, you can't do that. Learning to love, understand, and accept ourselves is a task we must tackle on our own, lonely as that may seem.

That said, we humans are here to support each other as we muddle through our own journeys. We're here to share and acknowledge our thoughts and feelings, our ups, our downs, our best and worst sides. We're here to accept each other at our Instagrammable best and at our room-clearing ripper worst. Without a handful of people who offer that level of refuge, we may find stress and negativity backing up in our brains like gas in our guts, and if we can't release it (the stress and the gas), it'll end up causing us unnecessary pain and suffering.

Now that you are (perhaps) convinced that true love is about farting, how do you know you've found that special, toot-tolerant someone? There's really only one way. Fart. Granted, passing gas is probably not something you should dive into on a first date. Indeed, reaching fart levels of familiarity can take years, and by the time you get there, some small (or huge) measure of romance will have probably evacuated your relationship. On the up side, once farts become fair play, you'll know you're both in it for the long haul, because no one lets fly among those that might be repulsed or repelled by their personal vapors. You have to feel pretty darn certain this person isn't going anywhere before you share the gaseous remains of that Indian buffet you indulged in at lunch.

Another, more polite way of saying all this is love and family are about comfort and security. They're about acceptance and connection. They're about crafting a place where you feel safe being you and letting others be themselves. Where you can, literally and figuratively, let it all toot out.

So, my dear child, as you venture out into the world in search of a long-term mate, find someone you can build a fart-friendly home with. It may be smelly, but you'll know it's full of the right kind of love.