Romance is dead.

Dead? In my house it’s shot, stuffed and mounted. Yesterday my dear husband was giving me and the kids a ride to school. Now some days, I hop out of the car with my son and take the subway so the husband can just drive across town to his office, and some days my son gets out of the car by himself and the husband drives me downtown (a little more traffic) and drops me at my office. It changes depending on the weather, or his mood, or my mood. Whatever.

So yesterday we drop the son, wave goodbye, tell him to have a good day…and one block later Husband turns west to cross town…instead of going downtown to drop me. I said, “Um, honey…”
And he looks over and says, “Oh crap! You’re still in the car?”

After I stopped laughing, I said, “Y’know, cherished. That’s the word for how I feel right now.”

You say Bidet...

French is weird. Take the word “jour,” meaning ‘day.” As in Bon-jour. Okay I get that, “jour” means ‘day’ because I get the Wall Street Journal every day. But then go to the word for week. Semaines. Now maybe that takes the “se” from “sept” meaning seven, which would make it seven days…but then, shouldn’t week be ‘sejours, not se-maines? Maines? What’s that? They ought to go together. Like Day and Week.

One of my favorite French words is “Pantouffle.” Pantouffle. Means bedroom slipper. Which I get, because it sounds fluffy, doesn’t it? Could be a breakfast waffle, but it works for me as a bedroom slipper, too. You can just see a pantouffle – one of those high-healed pink marabou feathered things movies stars wear…but then, what does a French man wear? Pantouffles. Now do we understand the French?

And the differences go way beyond language, let me tell you. Think about the bidet. It’s like a little mini-toilet sink thing the French have just for washing their privates. Okay. Clean. I respect that. But think about this. It’s in the bathroom. It requires plumbing. It’s not like a toaster or a microwave you buy after the fact when the mood hits you. You can’t just think, hey honey, maybe we’ll pick up a bidet at the Home Depot today. No.

You have to plan it. It takes architecture. You have to run piping through that thing. And hot water. It’s not a casual decision. Which means, when a Frenchman builds his house he knows he’s going to have sex in it. He’s planning on it. He makes room for it.

What do Americans make room for? Eating. According to the HomeBuilders Association, the biggest room in new houses now is the kitchen. Thousands of square feet. Sub-zero freezers and islands pushing right up to the TV wall. Forget the Living Room. We’ve gotten rid of that altogether. We don’t want to visit with people. Unless they’re here to eat. Because that’s what we’re planning to do.

Can you imagine if Americans 'fessed up to sex and adopted the bidet? First thing, we’d super-size it, of course. “Yeah, come on in. Nope, that’s not a hot tub, that’s the bidet. Strip y’self down and git yer privates nice and clean. Room for the whole family, ain’t that swell?”

Gosh if we had that much sex, when would we have time to go to war?