The Luv Doc

Dear Luv Doc,
I have a really tricky situation with my girlfriend. She is smoking hot and fun to be around but she farts a lot. I’m not talking about when she’s alone or when she’s sleeping (which she does) I am talking about all the time. Her farts are not that smelly, it’s just that she doesn’t even try to hold them in around me. She thinks it’s funny when she farts. It was at first, but she does it all the time now, and she won’t quit. She says if I love her I have to love her farts. I don’t think that’s true. What do you think? Should I draw a line?
- Gassed

First of all, Gassed, I want to apologize for not getting around to your question until now. I was busy washing my hair … or whatever. For all I know you may be dead by now. If so, my bad. I may have underestimated the direness of your situation. A lot of people think farts are hilarious. Not so. Why? Because people need oxygen to laugh. Farts contain less than 10% oxygen. The other 90% is both highly flammable and/or highly odorous – in other words, hard to love. Of course, that could be said about a lot of things. Imagine if 90% of the smokestack emissions from … say … Dell Computers were both noxious and flammable. Austin would be at their gates with pitchforks and torches (careful with those torches) demanding that they relocate to Houston – or at the very least, Pasadena.

You could ask your girlfriend to relocate to Pasadena, but before you do, let me throw a few stones at your glass house. Let’s start by acknowledging that everybody farts. Some of us are just sneakier at it than others. My guess is that you grew up in a more repressive environment than your girlfriend. Maybe you were an altar boy who had to keep your sphincter clenched through an entire Latin mass. Maybe she grew up in a clothing-optional hippie commune where they had rice and beans for dinner every night and a ritual digestif of ecstatic flatulence. You can probably slip in a silent-but-deadly in the middle of a board meeting without breaking character while she carpet bombs the whole cube farm on the way to make her herbal tea in the break room.

It’s all good, bro. You probably complement each other. Maybe, after a few years of your scorn and derision, she will tighten up a bit, but don’t count on it. She knows the secret. You can hold it in all you want, but it’s eventually going to come out. Maybe you should learn how to laugh at these intermittent odorous reminders of your mortality. If you can’t do that, there’s always Beano.