HEALTHY TEETH FOR A HEALTHY LIFE

I am one of the few people I know who enjoys going to the dentist. Really. I love my dental hygienist and my dentist is pretty nice. Plus, I have never had a cavity or any real dental problems so I don’t cower in anticipatory fear whenever someone mentions the dentist.

Anyway, I was chatting with the dental hygienist today and telling her all about married life. She herself is recently married and asked me how the first year was going and reminded me that the first year is supposed to be the hardest so if things were going well now, the rest of our lives should be smooth sailing. We both talked (well, she talked and I occasionally gargled assent with a mouth full of dental tools) about how marriage means compromises that didn’t exist when you were just dating and laughed about how both of our husbands refuse to go out for brunch, but have no problem consuming the same meal if you call it a late breakfast.

The dentist, Dr. Magnani, then came into the room and overheard our conversation. He recounted a story to me about how he came from a family with almost no women and his wife came from a family with almost no men. As a result, Dr. Magnani always expected the toilet seat to be up and his wife expected it to be down. Not long after Dr. Magnani and his wife were married, he heard his wife yelling in the middle of the night. It turns out that he had left the toilet seat up, and in the dark, his wife had fallen into the bowl and needed help dislodging herself. He began to leave the seat down.

Then, he explained to me that marriage is not unlike dental floss. Each person is holding a side and if you don’t really care about an issue, then when the other person pulls, you let them. If you do care, you pull and hope the other person comes to you. But, neither teeth nor marriages are healthy when both sides of the floss get pulled constantly. Neat. I will try to remember that.