Dear Luv Doc,
I was sitting on the couch watching a murder mystery with my boyfriend a few nights ago and he asked me if I would help him bury a corpse. Of course I said no, he would not be my boyfriend if he murdered someone. He said he didn’t say that he had murdered the person we were supposed to bury. I said then WHY ARE WE EVEN BURYING A CORPSE? He got up and said he was leaving. I asked him why and he said because I obviously don’t have his back. We literally haven’t talked since. Am I the bad person here? If I am dating someone does that mean I have to be OK with them murdering someone?
– Not Digging This
Absolutely not. This is obviously a trick question. It’s the equivalent of “Do you just love me for my looks?” There is no completely right answer. One thing I do know is that I have made an impressive number of laps around the sun and never once has anyone asked me to bury a corpse. Actually, let me amend that by saying that no one has ever asked me to bury a human corpse. I know there are probably a lot of podcast listeners out there who are thinking, “Has someone asked the Luv Doc to bury an alien corpse?” Y’all need to simmer the fuck down. I have only been asked to assist in the burial of one dog and one hamster – neither were my idea. Everything else has gone in the dumpster or down the toilet. Oh, and, full disclosure: I have spread some human ashes, but I don’t think that counts as a corpse, does it?
The hamster was a class hamster and the dog, well, the dog was as much a memorial service as a burial. What are you going to do? People need a place to grieve. Speaking of, it’s 2026 and we have tons of photographs and videos and even three-dimensional talking holograms if we want to spend the money, so why are we still having open-casket funerals? I’m sure there’s someone who owns a funeral home that will op-ed this op, but in this day and age, open-casket funerals are some unnecessarily morbid shit. I have yet to go to an open-casket funeral, look at the corpse, and think, “Yeah, this is how I would like to remember him: waxy, pale, supine, bloodless.” Hard pass. Cue the PowerPoint and let’s start the waterworks.
But here’s the deal on the corpse-burying thought experiment: It’s not so much about whether you would put in the work, which, even in the softest of soils, is a tremendous undertaking (see what I did there?), it’s about whether you trust someone’s belief that burying the corpse is the right and moral thing to do. Now look, I’m guessing that, like, 999 times out of 1,000, this is absolutely not the case, but hypothetically, there are probably some instances where killing a person might be justified, and some even rarer cases where an unofficial, secretive burial might be necessitated. I do not intend to list them here. I only concede that they might exist.
So the real issue is, if your boyfriend comes to you and says, “I have a corpse I need you to help me bury,” would you assume he had an ironclad, morally unimpeachable reason for doing so, or would you instead believe he was trying to drag you into something nefarious? I think we would all like to believe ourselves only capable of the former even though history has rarely ever shown that to be the case. Fortunately, this one of those hypotheticals where facts, statistics, and analytical reasoning don’t really play into it.
The question he was really asking you was, “Do you trust me?” He’s saying, “If I ask you to help me bury a corpse, would you trust me enough to do it, no questions asked?” Hey, I get it. You’re not there yet, and that’s probably a healthy thing. Maybe the best reply would have been, “Can I trust that you will never put me in a situation where I have to help you bury a corpse?” I think that’s a fair question. If I have managed to avoid it for this long, how hard can it be? So, as controversial as it might be, my answer is: No, you never have to be OK with your boyfriend murdering someone.
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This article appears in March 20 • 2026.
