Honestly, I don’t even remember when or how peeing in bottles became this big thing in our marriage. It just was. We lived on the Edwardsville campus in family housing at Southern Illinois University and turned one of the bedrooms into a makeshift office with a desktop computer. This was 2003, when desktops were still those big clunky beasts most folks needed just to get on the internet.

My husband and I each spent many hours at that desktop PC. Personally, I read, wrote, and researched. I dreamed a lot about working from home. When I wasn’t on EBay or looking up knitting patterns (for another business I believed I would someday begin), I was blogging on Xanga or consuming YA fan fiction based upon shows like Smallville and One Tree Hill.

Eventually, I began dabbling in writing my own fan fiction, but it inevitably turned out smutty or LGBT and that confused me since I was so immersed in the guilt of evangelical purity culture. I was still a married virgin.

After a while, I began to audibly groan each time I stepped into our little office. Another pee bottle? You've got to be kidding me. I kept finding plastic beverage bottles filled with my husband's pee. Our bathroom was no more than five feet away from the computer, yet my spouse had begun a habit of peeing into water or soda bottles right there at the computer.

I had a lot of questions.

I didn't understand why it didn't bother him to have pee bottles lying around the house. I was also unclear how on earth every bottle was, well, full. What that meant was that my husband was going to the trouble of opening a partially filled bottle just to keep on filling it. Didn't the stench bother him? And what if he had more... volume than the bottle would contain? Were there pee accidents that he was cleaning up behind my back?

After several occasions of finding urine-filled bottles nonchalantly stuck beneath the computer table, I became extremely frustrated. My husband was unable to answer any of my questions about his habit. He couldn't tell me why he refused to empty his bladder in the bathroom. Or why, at the very least, he couldn't discard the damn pee bottles so I didn't have to look at them.

Every question I asked was answered with an exasperated, "I don't know."

"Well, I don't want to keep seeing them," I said.