Romance is a source of mystery for most men. You try to open the door for a woman and she tells you she's not coming into the men's room. You spell her name in rose petals and she spells your name on a restraining order. Romance is confusing! Luckily, I remembered something my third fifth grade teacher said to me. Not about romance (he taught me about that with only his eyes and hands), but about learning. He said books! Something about books! Well I tried it. And after reading these books and their 1516 tips on romance, the only thing I know about the subject is that books are idiots. 365 Things Every Couple Should Know by Doug Fields Tidbit books are more telling about the author than any psychological test. They're written by self-appointed experts who run out of wit after about 10 exhortations. But what do you do when you're out of stuff to say and are contractually obligated to say 355 more things? You yank open your brain and let it shit all over the keyboard. Things your brain never should have eaten. Things it gave up trying to digest years ago. Things you can take one look at and know they couldn't be anything other than waste. Doug Fields has done this, and some dark and telling things escaped. It's hard to tell whether Doug married a woman he wasn't attracted to, or if he married someone who was later disfigured by a fire. There are a lot of hints like this one that the two of them can't stand looking at each other without their spiritual beer goggles on. Well, He is the one that gave her that face. It'd be weird of Him to come back and say, "Her personality is like an 8, but I'm not into horse heads on human women." Ugh. Is there maybe a grosser way you could have put that? Like "After 60, your lover's eyes will hatch millipedes that crawl into your dick hole." Or "The liftable folds of your lover hide surprises of soup and keepsakes." Glad to see they're narrowing it down. Hey, Doug, are you going to tell your wife that you're gay, or are you going to let your sense of humor break it to her? Are they? Because I'd feel better if your wife knew that her horrible face makes her a horrible person. Trust me, I'm starting to get that, Doug. Hell, I want her to be attractive too. But clearly, we both want that less than she wants another bucket of chicken. Or another kerosene/face accident. I know. And by that, I mean "I'm masturbating." Ha! You set me up for that one, Bible! Is that the original Hebrew version of the burning bush story? Seriously, though. I really don't think it's healthy to compare myself to Moses when I'm just fucking and unemployed. How do they expect me to take a year off from work to bone? It's easy for Moses- God drops manna on him when he's hungry, and when you can part the Red Sea, opening a woman's legs is like a card trick. Plus, all that parting is going to structurally devastate my wife's Red Sea. Do vaginoplasties fall from Heaven? Even with my Gentile-sized dong, a year straight of unbridled knowing is going to have our children crawling into this world through a tunnel of collapsed chef salad. Really, Doug? Because it seems like you can't type for a single sentence without mentioning God, sex or how ugly your wife is. All of those are going to make for a truly disgusting and inappropriate story to tell your own children. I'm not even related to you and your courtship stories have taken a year off my erection's life. Like with a heartfelt shriek or a friendly vomit. For example, with Doug's wife, her left arms are a few inches longer than her right one. In that no one likes it? Or because one guy gets really noisy and everyone else takes the opportunity to go pee? Or is it because afterward it takes two guys 20 minutes to load your wife into a van? Doug, you can't just drop an analogy grenade like that and run. I admire your optimism, buddy; you keep fucking that caterpillar. The Simply Romantic Wife is collection of husband-pleasing tips for baffled wives written by a collective of religiously persecuted women. Its romantic advice focuses on reading the Bible to your husband, obeying him and obeying his dong. Liberated women will react to this book as if it was written in teen body parts. However, if youâre only one of several of your husbandâs wives, it has some great ideas on how to stand out. What am I married to, a goddamn sheep dog? I don't need to put your stupid little puzzle together because I already know where we're going. You're taking me to the hospital after I slam my balls in this drawer to hide my sperm from you. Take your own advice, lady. I know your husband asked you to sit quietly and stop chewing your way out of your restraints, and yet here you are writing a book. This would make more sense to your husband if you weren't wearing that bow under your helmet, you congenital tragedy. Thanks for the terrific example, wife, but I guarantee you that your husband's only hobby is establishing alibis. A massage? Are you so lazy you bought your husband a handjob, or did he throw his back out hating you? Another gift certificate. Lady, what is romantic about taking all his money and trading it for money he can only use at certain places? It'd be like kicking out all the car windows so he doesn't have to roll them down. Or taking too many sleeping pills to save him the trouble of choking you unconscious. OK, so you write him a note, do a round of editing, make a cover letter, call him, arrange an appointment and then fax him a non-steamy message. Look, Simply Romantic Wife, I can't do this anymore. If you were my wife, I would draw pictures of your dead body on the inside of contact lenses. I would replace your life with spiders. I would make my secretary read your notes out loud while our divorce lawyer watched us screw. The closest thing I have to happiness is picturing your face when they read the will after my suicide. I am leaving everything to a foundation that gives statues of you being chewed apart by dogs to the homeless. This saccharine compendium contains over 300 pages of romantic advice along with lists of popular love songs, love coupons and Kathy comics. If you're a male reader, you'll find you now have erectile dysfunction. If you're a female reader, you'll either find the advice too simplistic or carefully take it all in as you spray reduction fluid from your zarb spout and shapeshift down to your Earth human form. Sweetheart, how can you say there's no romance in our life? Look at all these stamps! I... I don't get it. Am I dating a post card? Am I trying to make an envelope feel special before I fill it with mayonnaise and fuck it? Because that's crazy! This bud's for you!? Did I meet my girlfriend by thawing a football fan frozen in the late 80s and then shaving it until it looked like a woman? This suggestion is so dated and non-romantic you might as well shout, "Where's the beef?" and hit her with a dead bird. Oh, you mean for a love note? She'll love that. She can spend August eating stale, chalky candy and wondering why she's dating a guy with the game of a second grader. Using Valentine Conversation Hearts to tell a girl you like her is like taking a crap in her toilet. You're using things exactly how they were designed to be used, but you still look like an asshole. If you're writing a note with candy, you might as well make it a note about your missing penis. You know what? Go ahead and just pee on them because she's going to think you did that anyway. Or maybe train tracks! Her favorite baling press! What's great about this one is that you can do it on a woman you just met or one who hasn't even seen your face! Yeah, the pizza chef will love that. Why don't I specifically ask the entire kitchen staff to scrape their balls across it before they serve it to us? The only reason you should do this is to test your woman. If she says, "What is this gay crap?" you're safe. If she goes, "Oh my God, a HEART! Did you put them up to this!?" don't fuck her. Because if this dingbat is wooed by heart pizza then literally every man she's ever met has tricked her into having sex. I know for a fact this one doesn't work: Great idea. You might as well add "on my DICK!" to the memo line too. And sign it, "Your intolerable, meddling mother." It really doesn't matter what you put on there because when you hand a woman a fake check, she already hates it as much as she can hate anything. I don't get it. Is that because sex is more fun with a knife wound? "... and on the lighter side of the news, two fat idiots died in a grease fire they started in their own car! Apparently, the couple was intent on making their affordable yet rat-fecal meal into a romantic evening out! Well, they missed! The coroner himself said it was the least romantic death he'd seen since his own mother died during labor. Coming up next, a local cat can't believe a sudden nearby sound!" What the hell? Is that to complete some kind of ancient prophecy? Is there a treasure map hidden in my woman? I guess that explains why Nicolas Cage is inside her, but I still have so many questions. Romance is like playing Mastermind except the girl never tells you which pegs you got right. And then what? You stare at each other and wonder how the two of you can live with yourselves? Wait, how does someone with such a remedial sense of sexuality even know what anal sex is? A medical accident? A few pages ago, you told my woman to bake me a giant cookie and we were talking TWO FEET IN DIAMETER HERE. To me, that says you don't even have sex unless it's through a hole in boxer shorts and before a three hour apology to God. And now you've left the land of wholesome caring and sharing to tell my woman to dangle her drawers in front of commuters while you wink at me about going in her butt? It's schizophrenic and gross. I feel like I just heard my grandma describe how they fisted in her day. That way, when she needs her registration, she'll know it's in the center of the giant, sticky pod of melted candy. My only concern is that if she gets pulled over, some state trooper is going to shoot her for hatching Gremlins in her car. Wait, wait, I get it. In this one, there is a pun intended. What the fucking fuck? There isn't a circumstance that exists where this isn't batshit crazy. Husbands, if your wife answers the door in her wedding dress, just run. And don't look back; all the children and pets behind her are already dead.

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