Dear Husband: The Bathroom Is Not A Man Cave

Dear Husband,

You’re a pretty awesome guy. If I didn’t think that, I wouldn’t have married you (because as you know, I have impeccable taste). But there’s something that we need to talk about.

It’s your bathroom habits. They stink, my love, and I mean that on so many levels.

I totally understand that sometimes when you’ve gotta go, you’ve gotta go. But here’s the thing: I’m a little suspicious of your timing, like when we’re pulling into the driveway with a car full of groceries, and suddenly your bowels are incapable of keeping the turd brigade at bay a single moment longer. You rush inside to “drop the kids off at the pool,” and I’m left with a trunk-load of perishables to haul in and put away. Miraculously (cough), the same thing seems to happen at other inopportune moments as well, like when it’s time to herd the children through their bedtime routine, which you know is like putting squids in T-shirts. Or when there are dirty dishes in the sink that you’ve promised to get to, you know, sometime before tomorrow’s dinner. It all seems a little too … convenient.

For one of us, anyway.

We’re both adults with decades of defecation experience under our belts. There are no amateurs here. So I have a hard time believing that you absolutely, positively cannot hold it.

Believe it or not, I poop too. Yet I’m routinely able (okay, forced, if you wanna know the truth) to postpone it until a more convenient time. If you only knew how many mornings I have idled in the school drop-off line, cheeks tightly clenched against gravity, silently willing the cars in front of me to just! Freaking! Move! before my bowels do.

Even so, I have managed to go through my entire adult lifetime without any embarrassing public pants-crapping incidents (of my own, anyway, but the kids are another story). When something needs to be dealt with in a timely manner, I deal with it before I hit the john.

I’m not some sort of poop-controlling prodigy; I’m a normal person with normal bowel activity, so I can confidently say that your sudden need to drop everything and drop deuce is highly suspect.

Also, my dear, there’s a huge, glaring discrepancy between the urgency of your poop and the time it takes you to finish. Typically, when you’re on the verge of soiling yourself—as you claim to be, every single time—business is over within seconds of sitting on the toilet. Yet here you are half an hour later, still glued to the porcelain throne with your phone in your hands. Something tells me your drawn-out dumps are more like marathon Candy-Crushing, Facebooking, YouTube-watching, meme-forwarding, virtual-deer-hunting, TikTok-ing sessions. A true poop “emergency” wouldn’t leave you sitting there until your butt cheeks fall asleep.

While you’re whiling away the (blissful, solitary) minutes in the can, the clock is still ticking, which means I’m left to take care of the time-sensitive issues: putting the milk away before it gets gross, putting the kids to bed before it’s an hour past their bedtime, doing the dishes before dinner becomes so crusted on that only a chisel or a belt-sander will remove it.

Also? You forget to turn on the exhaust fan. And though you may not mind marinating in your own stench for long stretches of time, the rest of your family would appreciate some proper ventilation. Especially when the smell starts to seep into the hallway.

I hope you can see the issues here.

Husband, you may be number one at going number two on cue—or at least feigning a state of lower-intestinal emergency—but your pooping is pissing me off. So, remember this:

1. Selfless pooping is a common courtesy.
2. The bathroom is not a man cave.
3. If you sit there long enough for your legs to go numb, you probably didn’t need to poop that badly to begin with.

Those are the three key points that I’m hoping you’ll glean from this letter.

And I’m e-mailing this link to you so you can read it on the toilet, because we all know that’s where you’re going to be.

With Love and Concern,

Your Wife