Over the last almost five decades, I’ve had to invest a great deal of time, effort and money into therapy: independent therapy, couple’s counseling, and even some new-fangled bullshit called “discernment” counseling. (We’re too nervous to try ketamine therapy.) It’s all due to the online trolling by ridiculously sensitive Gen Z kids who think I’m a heartless cheater looking for a raunchy, meaningless hook-up in the dunes on the cape. Well, I’m here to say that those kids don’t know WTF they’re talking about on TikTok.

Yes, I’ll admit I told the whole world I was tired of my lady. She was by no means thrilled with my public disclosure, but she understood we’d been together too long—since the initial U.S. pull-out from Vietnam, the same year the pet rock was created. I’m certain those Gen Zers don’t even know what a pet rock was; it was a hell of a long time ago, before Starbucks and fancy Stanley tumblers and boba tea with tapioca pearls and souvenir straws. My wife retorted, privately, that she wasn’t exactly still getting butterflies for me, either, not with my balding head, lack of laundry skills and occasional erectile dysfunction. In my defense, I did note she was akin to my favorite song, and I’m pretty judgmental when it comes to music.

These kids have to understand, this was a whole Jurassic world before social media; this was a time before the internet and iPhones and free porn—unless you count late night Cinemax. I literally had to read a printed newspaper to find that infamous personal column. And here’s the thing—those notes had to be prepared, typed and mailed—like, in an envelope with a lick-only stamp—to the paper’s editor. It took at least 48 hours to be printed. You had to pay by the word, too! This was not a free, anonymous, last-minute or thoughtless endeavor like an experiment on Grindr. And I really shouldn’t have to say this, but the whole damn situation was per the advice of our sex therapist. My middle-aged wife and I decided to “meet” one another again in a local bar called O’Malley’s to spice up our sex life; married people do this shit all the time.

My wife was—and still is—the woman of my dreams, but she didn’t know how to let her hair down, then. (I was, quite frankly, surprised by her personal ad noting she liked piña coladas because she didn’t drink much other than Tang—and Boone’s Farm, but only when she was horny. She most definitely became a giant b-i-t-c-h when she got caught in the rain immediately after a perm.) Still, our therapist asked us to dream big, so I wrote it for all the universe to see: I don’t like health food! I like champagne! And then I waited at O’Malley’s sans underwear, my button-down Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned to my belly button, cigarette smoke wafting through my chest hair, for my new-and-improved-and-open-to-public-sex wife to walk in wearing her ironed Calvin Klein jeans and spiked heels.

We left that night together, and a little bit happier than we had been before we walked in alone. That’s what matters! We even tried making love at midnight on the beach; it isn’t something we ever tried again, though, because, despite the romantic notion, sand can find its way into crevices you’d prefer it not get into. Also, sand fleas are a real phenomenon, and the smell of rotting fish is a mood killer, for sure. The point is, we’re still together, all these years later, and I would know her smile and the curve of her face in an instant blindfolded. She’s the lady I looked for, and she came home with me to escape our ho-hum daily existence. So suck it, kids. Your SpongeBob SquarePants has nothing on our Laverne and Shirley.

————

Brittany K. Fonte holds an MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction). She has published four books, edited a Lambda Literary Finalist in Poetry Anthology, and currently works, on occasion, as a screenwriter when she isn’t teaching in an MFA program or dodging spitballs in a public high school classroom. Basically, she wants to prove to her teenaged children that she is, in fact, funny AF.