two too many
by Burt Prelutsky
I don’t know how much attention, if any, sociologists have given to the study of couples, but I have a feeling the answer is, not enough. Lately, I’ve been giving couples a great deal of thought, and I believe they warrant looking into by those academic types who have government grants and way too much time on their hands.
My own preliminary observations lead me to one inescapable conclusion; namely, that it’s a wonder that couples ever have other couples for friends.
Consider any two couples you know. That’s four separate people. As individuals, they might all be just fine. Or at least acceptable. But the odds are against the four of them being compatible. For instance, let’s say that the two men are the primary friends. Perhaps they work together, maybe they’re old school chums who hunt or fish or drink together, or maybe they just root for the same football team. Any of those things could bind men, simple creatures that we are, for life. But the two women in the group might be as different as any two women on the planet. One could be a driven career type, while the other might be a dedicated homemaker. Albert Einstein and a New Guinea headhunter would have more in common, and be far less hostile to one another.
If things were reversed and it was the women who were chums, one of the men could be a member of the ACLU, while the other one could well be a fine, rational, upstanding member of the community.
With just four people involved, you might think there was a fairly good chance they’d all get along. You might even assume they’d all like each other. There is always that chance, of course, but the actual odds of that being the case are 47,000,000 to one.
For openers, not every couple is mutually devoted. So you start out with some likelihood that even the two people in the couple wish the other one was traveling at the speed of light somewhere in space.
There are exceptions, naturally, foursomes in which each person looks upon the other three with boundless love and affection. But, far more often than not, I’m betting that, at the end of the evening, at least one of the wives is saying to her husband, “I’ll never know what Agnes ever saw in Dave,” and one of the husbands is saying to his wife, “I give that marriage six more months. Sooner, if Jack comes to his senses.”
It’s an absolute wonder to me that couples ever manage to get together with other couples. Believe me, I speak from experience. I bet it’s been nearly two years since another couple has invited us to do anything with them. And, frankly, I don’t get it, because my wife seems like a very nice person.
###