Chapter Fifteen: Oversharing

It’s time to take a break from cerebral discussions and focus on more corporeal ones.

Any burgeoning relationship involves compromise. True, it should not involve giving up everything that makes you unique in the process.

However, there are plenty of other areas that require addressing when discussing this issue. One of particular note is the area of doing things that are just a little too personal.

My friend Heather giggles as she shifts in her chair, her gorgeous frame resonating with her laugh. “So, Mike and I talked about one of our common interests last night,” she teases.

I look up with interest, contemplating what might come next: Crocheting? Model-ship building? Rock-climbing?

She leans in close, and her eyes light up mischievously. “Sport-farting.”

I choke on my iced tea, and this makes her laugh even more. Her eyes sparkle, and I’m nonplussed by the thought of someone so beautiful and enticingly sophisticated hiking up a leg and tearing one off for the hell of it.

In the years since, I’ve been treated firsthand to the experience of a relationship that included the concept of sport-farting. In the beginning, it all seems so innocent and natural. After all, if you’ve come home after a long day, punctuated with a lunch of Mexican food and an afternoon of desperately clinched buttocks, you can appreciate how great it could be to feel unfettered relief. Just walk through the door, give the wife a peck on the cheek, drop into a comfy chair, and scorch a hole in the cushion. Scratch yourself, check the stocks, and proceed to relax.

It sounds good on the surface. It really does. Anything that adds a dimension of comfort to a relationship seems like a good idea. However, like salt, chocolate, or honesty, anything employed without reservation quickly leads to unpleasant side effects.

For instance: Consider the venue. I believe that there are some basic rules that need to be applied:

Farting in the car. Moving or stationary, this should automatically fall into the “verboten” category. If you’re driving along, then rolling down the window in the middle of a good song on the radio or a meaningful conversation—although thoughtful—starts to simply underscore the brazenness of what you’re doing. After a while, it produces a Pavlovian response in the other occupant of the vehicle that—regardless of olfactory devastation—compels them to hang like a golden retriever out of the window. It’s hard to be romantic when you’re leaning over the door card, especially if you’re trying to hold hands. Besides, Mother always warned you about what would happen if you decided to hang body parts out the window.

Beyond the obvious, there is an argument against farting in motor vehicles when the other possible occupant is in absentia. For one, it’s obnoxious when your significant other hops into the car solo for a Rocky Road run at ten o’clock, only to discover that you ripped one off after you got home from work and subsequently hotboxed it for five hours by leaving the windows up. Subtract five points for farting on leather, out of sheer gall. Subtract fifty for farting on velour, and then allowing the other unsuspecting person to foosh-out your handiwork when they sink comfortably into the upholstery.

Farting in public places. This is dicey, because it can be both a good example and, yet, a non-example. For instance, if it’s breezy and in a wide-open space, then actually, it’s a great time to fart. Perhaps you can do so silently, and then only you will know what’s transpired, and you can take secret delight in your prowess. Or, perhaps someone will hear, but you can take a lemons-to-lemonade approach by enthusiastically critiquing the sound and quality, or using it as a handy pivot to scorn the host for serving cucumber sandwiches.

However, even the best of plans can go awry. You run the risk of having the wind shift, or someone suddenly start walking behind you. Realize in advance that the larger of you will be blamed for the faux pas, so be careful what arguments you implicitly start through your own actions.

If the day is windless, then you risk towing the fart with you wherever you go. You can try spinning around to manufacture your own Coriolis effect, but it’s hard to do so and appear suave. You’ll either look like Maria von Trapp getting ready to burst into song, or you’ll look like someone who’s trying desperately to shoo away a fart.

Enclosed public places fall under the aforementioned caveats of “farting in a car.” Unless it’s a restroom, even if it seems like a good idea: it’s a bad idea.

Farting in your home. This is an extensive topic of discussion, and frankly, unless you find yourself in a room with a toilet and an exhaust fan (or a wide-open window and a healthy draft—OUT the window, I should note), you’re in the wrong place for a sport-fart.

I once came home and set-up shop with my laptop at the dining room table. Unbeknownst to me, my roommate was coming home right behind me, and was, incidentally, talking on his cell phone to his sister. I, believing that the domicile was my own, and—I should note—with the at least cursory forethought of opening the sliding-glass door and windows accordingly—tore off something that caused even me to feel slightly queasy.

When my roommate came down the hallway, he stopped dead in the living room, turned on his heel, eyes wide and eyebrows arched, and proceeded to editorialize to his sister, “Jesus, did someone shit their pants?”

I was, incidentally, never subsequently introduced to his sister.

Farting in bed. This is a very touchy area. I hesitate to lump all of my experiences in this realm into a “don’t do it!” pronouncement, but if I had my druthers, that’s how I’d rule.

Total condemnation aside, there are legitimate concerns here. For one, you have the element of control, or, more precisely the lack thereof. We’ve all woken ourselves up farting, whether it was because we had a bowl of Kashi before bed, or because we had a fart-dream, where—much like the double-crossing dreams that lead us to believe it’s okay to pee—our body tricks us into doing what it wants.

Sleep-farting requires careful handling to control damage. There are three primary steps in assessing the aftermath:

1. How bad was it (both concerning sound and olfactory quality)?

2. Did I awaken the other person?

3. Depending on the answers to numbers one and two, how do I proceed?

The generally forgivable nature of sleep-farting dictates that if one awakens the other person, one should apologize, and if the awakening caused the other person to spontaneously vomit, one should apologize even more ardently. Everyone has done this, and everyone can survive the experience. If anything, that’s a testament to love. Trust me: the first time the other person goes to bed with diarrhea and you are awakened for other more-urgent reasons that involve changing the sheets and 3 a.m. visits to the laundromat, you’ll understand the true nature of grace, and realize what it means to be with someone once the glamor wears off.

Now, circumstantial farting aside, there are two camps of sleep-farters with whom I take issue. One is comprised of people who do retaliatory farting. The other encompasses people who treat farting as cursory, like yawning and stretching in the morning.

Retaliatory farters are the ones who, for whatever reason, derive pleasure from ripping a fart under the sheets, and then letting it waft around. They’re the ultimate sophomores who deserve to be slapped. This is the kind of behavior that you’re only allowed once—maybe twice—a year. If it’s more than that, you’re just a prick.

Morning farters drive me crazy. With the bathroom mere feet away, they somehow feel compelled to greet the morning with a honking fart, which more often than not tends to work nicely as an alarm clock for the other occupant of the bed.

In a serious vein, however, it’s hard to kiss someone good-morning (or—depending on the staying power—good-bye) when your eyes are watering. The result is similar to always going to bed angry and waking-up disgusted. If you start the day on the wrong foot (or orifice), it tends to go downhill from there.

Little behaviors have a lot of power when it comes to shaping our relationships and determining how well we’re going to get along with someone else. Like glops of toothpaste in the sink, food left out on the counter, or towels left in a heap on the floor: it’s the tiny stuff that conspires to drive you absolutely, completely insane.

I don’t think anyone has ever predicated the terminus of a relationship upon annoying behaviors. At least, if they did, I’d love to get some e-mail outlining what happened, and how they decided to frame the experience to the other person as justification for splitting-up. “It’s not you; it’s the empty roll of toilet paper.”

Moreover, I sense that behaviors like this elude identification and elimination through dating. So long as you limit your contact with someone else, they will—in spite of themselves—behave in a fundamentally civil way, all things being equal. I term these “comfort behaviors,” and they only surface when two people let their guard down and enjoy an opportunity to truly, unabashedly, be themselves. (“Comfort behaviors” are those that emerge when you have a shared residence, and thus a captive audience.)

You might run into the more egregious ones while you’re dating, but most of these tend to be suppressed. It’s all about whether someone knows that they’re the problem, and whether they care.

The trick in navigating nuance lies in communication. It’s not unreasonable to say, for instance, “Hey, would you please rinse out the sink when you’re finished in the morning?” You can even sweeten the deal by compensating for one of your own despised behaviors. Phrase the request innocently. Don’t say, “Hey, could you please not leave hairs all over the sink?” Putting it that way only begs for a response along the lines of “Sure! Could you please not leave them all over the soap?”

Resisting the temptation to turn passive-aggressive and just stew over everything can be difficult. If we take the opportunity to keep score and lay waste later, we’re not teaching our partners anything, other than the fact that we’re calculating sons-of-bitches who are always gunning for the next perceived imperfection.

Comfort and trust are wonderful things, but mutual respect is even better. You know all those things you do to impress someone when you’re dating? Do them forever.

In the end, it’s always about give-and-take. It’s good to know that we can trust someone enough to be forgiven—even if that means having the sofa reupholstered.