Up the Valley: Love Hangover

Some tips for Singles on the care and feeding of their friends who are Couples: today’s column in the Star...

As I write this, I am recovering from a slight overindulgence in strong spirits during the previous night’s Valentine’s Day Swing Dance Celebration at the theater where I serve as producing director. That’s my title at the moment — this being The Theatah and the 21st Century, I may have been ousted or replaced by a programming algorithm by the time this column goes to press.

I appear to have a perverse need for self-torture around all holidays. Having become a complete Scrooge at Christmas, it made total sense that I would spend years owning a retail store guaranteed to extend my Holiday Hell to 12 months per annum. Caught in an endless cycle of selling ho-ho-haute décor, then going in on Christmas Day to mark it all down, my holidays during The Lost Retail Years boiled down to: Unpack, Display, Discount, Repack and Repeat — all to an endless soundtrack of “The Christmas Song” by Alvin & the Chipmunks.

And so — being the accomplished spinster that I am — it was inevitable that I would someday produce a romantic Valentine’s Day holiday love-fest at the theater. I must admit: It was a fun night. I rented a dance floor, booked a San Francisco swing band called the Martini Brothers, and took unexpected pleasure in watching the couples twirling and canoodling on the dance floor.

There is something so endearing about couples when they are dancing: the big guys who are surprisingly graceful, the pairs wordlessly performing synchronized dance routines they’ve polished over decades, and the carefree, youthful aspect adorning women as they are spun, flipped and dipped by a strong partner.

The dance floor, however, is one of the few places I find couple-dom particularly adorable. Although most of my closest friends occupy this mysterious, and for me unattainable, state-of-being, hanging out with couples can test a sensitized single person’s patience. It’s not that I don’t love them wholeheartedly — both collectively and individually. It’s when they start WE-ing all over me that fondness turns to frustration.

Consternating couple behavior often results from a shared email address. I will be in the middle of an extended online conversation with one spouse, when the other suddenly chimes in unannounced. Rarely do they identify which of them is typing, so I have to undertake an operation to break their secret codes and ciphers that would have baffled the Enigma-busting cryptologists of World War II.

The only reliable way to communicate via joint-custody email is to carefully restrict communications to each spouse’s areas of sole responsibility. If, for example, the wife has authority over calendars and bookings (which is the case 99.9 percent of the time), I know that regardless of which spouse reads my message proposing a date, the husband wouldn’t dare enter into a commitment on their behalf, and therefore any definitive response on the topic must have emanated from the wife.

The reverse is generally true when the topic is tools or technology, as in: Do I need to upgrade the software on my iPhone, should I choose Mac or PC, or what is a socket wrench? But trouble arises when it’s a subject on which both spouses share jurisdiction — like cooking, politics and the personal lives of their single friends.

Some socially active singletons tell me that they frequently feel they exist solely for the amusement of their married friends. Sharing the agony of the single person’s dating experience must serve the essential societal function of confirming a couple’s decision to remain married. Even I, with a social life that a Trappist Monk would find confining, sometimes feel like Carrie Bradshaw swilling Cosmos at the dinner table of Ward and June Cleaver. I imagine perplexed post-departure conversations with the kids during which the Beaver turns to his brother and asks: “Gee Wally, why doesn’t Laura just find some swell guy and get married like Mom did?”

But I find couples to be at their most intolerable when ordering food in restaurants. Yes — we get it — there are two of you, and so you can split and share everything on Life’s Menu. Not for you the sad, lonely, pitiable need to order an individual Caesar salad before your entree or — worse — having to make the heartbreaking choice between a salad OR an entree. Yes, you have — by virtue of having coupled-up — earned the right to enjoy both meat and pasta, but civility demands that you take both from your own plate and fork. Feeding each other by hand after the first 30 days of marriage should provide grounds for the rest of us to compel you two to live apart for a while.

My next production at the theater includes a musical performance by Oscar-winning actor Jeff Bridges and his band the Abiders. His gorgeous wife of 36 years is coming with him, and his talented daughter is his opening act. I can’t imagine what movie star/musician/ proud parent/couple behavior looks like, but if Mr. & Mrs. Bridges start feeding each other by hand during the VIP party, well — I for one cannot promise to abide.

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