I’d imagine that most couples had a far more romantic situation when they realized that the person across the table from them would be the person that they spent the rest of their lives with. I’m picturing an intimate candlelit dinner, or a walk in the park when all of the flowers are fragrant and blooming beautifully, maybe lazing around on bearskin rug in front of a cozy fireplace (complete with crackling logs, of course) with strawberries and champagne.

While I picture this to be all well and good for other people, the moment that I knew with absolute certainty that Dave was the man that (like it or not) I would be spending the rest of my days with was absolutely nothing like this. In fact, it was so far removed from romantic that it might be called The Anti-Romance.

You see, I knew that Dave would be my husband for as long as we both could stand each other when he not only allowed me to put my bucket of frozen fecal matter in his freezer, but offered to help me place the sample IN the bucket.

If that ain’t true love, I’ll never know what is.

But let me back up for a moment, to illuminate PRECISELY why I was doing this (and to reassure you that I don’t have some really foul fetish).

It started over the winter, the pain and the constant crapping, but I kept writing it off as stress or something that I’d eaten (I’m telling you here and now that health care professionals are REALLY the last to seek medical care). Eventually it dawned on me that my body was rebelling against me, and that mayhap I should get it checked out.

So I made an appointment with a gastroenterologist in the area, and begrudgingly trooped in, tail between my legs (no, unfortunately I do NOT have a vestigial tail, although that would be completely rad. Imagine the pranks I could pull!). Besides being completely intimidated by me (which is amazing, considering HE was going to be the one looking at MY colon. You’d imagine it’d be reversed here), he very thoroughly ordered a number of blood tests AND some *ahem* OTHER tests.

And these *ahem* OTHER tests were some of the most humiliating known to man. You think that someone looking up your pooper is shameful, wait, JUST wait until someone orders you to poop in a jar. AND THEN TAKE IT SOMEWHERE. Wait, wait, wait, I can make this MORE humiliating, I promise. Have someone inform you that you have to COLLECT all of your feces for 3! days, and THEN take it somewhere, where you are horrifyingly clear that some poor lab tech in the back is cursing you while gagging BECAUSE A COMPLETE STRANGER IS EXAMINING YOUR POO.

Hell, although the rest of my family is intent on disproving this, what with their insistance that when I sit upon the porcelain throne is the absolute perfect time to have a conversation with me and/or sneak a quick scratch behind the ears (I’m looking at YOU here, Daver), I don’t even like someone TALKING to me while I crap, let alone looking at my own personal byproducts. *I* don’t even want to look at them.

Dave insists that Rate-my-Poo dot com is the most hilarious site on the planet, but I won’t even load that into my search engine, because I do not find poo amusing. Poo jokes are golden (much like dick-n-fart jokes. Yes, I am, in fact a teenage boy, NOT a 27-year-old mother of two. Sorry about any confusion), but actually dealing with The Poo on a more intimate basis gives me the heebie-jeebies AND the Pee-Shivers.

So armed with my orders, my “hat,” my latex-free gloves, and my bucket, I decided to “do the deed” over the weekend. Which was the time of the week that I consistantly spent with my then-boyfriend, a time that both of us treasured. I am utterly unable to censor myself, so Dave was well aware of what lay before me, and although I offered to stay home and “complete my orders” he insisted that he didn’t mind. He even offered to clean out his freezer for my “sample” (I don’t think he’s cleaned out a freezer again, ever.).

It’s disgusting, when you think about it (well, all of this is pretty nasty), how one must collect the poo to put it in the (extremely large and reminded me of the buckets of cookie dough or popcorn that you get from the Girl Scouts. But filled with something far less awesome) bucket. You have to complete your “business” in a container that you put into the toliet affectionately called a “hat,” and THEN you must fish through your excriment to seperate the solid from the liquid (God, I have the heebie-jeebies just RECALLING this) and put it in the bucket that you’ve removed from the freezer.

Before you place the bucket back into the freezer, you must “burp” it, as the methane gas pressure can build up so much that the top will be blown off, spattering the insides of your freezer with what is decidedly NOT brownie batter.

I don’t know about you, but the absolute LAST thing that I want to do with my excrement is to touch it OR BURP IT, gloves on or not, so each time that I had to do this, I nearly wept out of shame and disgust. Dave, sensing my plight (well, more like having to listen to me whine and shake each time I had to do this), galantly offered to do it for me. He OFFERED to WILLINGLY handle my poop (I would never, ever offer to handle his, no matter how much he whined.). If that’s not love, I suppose that I’ll never know WHAT love is.

Monday morning came, and off I trucked back home which was about 45 minutes away, with the bucket-o-frozen poo sitting shotgun, strapped merrily in place. As I dropped it off at the lab, I’d wished that I were dead. No, scratch that, I’d wished that I was LESS THAN dead, I wished that I’d never been born at all. I wished that MY PARENTS had never been born. So great was my shame that I fell all over myself apologizing to the receptionist, the lab tech as well as the waiting room full of people who could have cared less. I’m certain that I looked insane.

I was later diagnosed with a mild case of Crohn’s disease, which has thankfully been in remission for several years. As for Daver and I, we’ve been more or less stuck with each other ever since. Every time that I become irritated by his colony of dirty socks that happily live next to our bed, I try my damndest to remind myself that, at one point in time, he selflessly offered to touch my poop.