• Love Is…Telling The World About Your Wife's Incontinence?

  Posted Tuesday, March 10, 2009 9:04 AM | By Jessica Grose
  
  
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  While many, like Marjorie, found this weekend's "Modern Love" touching, I found it to be deeply uncomfortable at best, and vaguely offensive at worst. Yes, it did make me wonder if I could handle it if my beloved became an invalid, but it also made me recoil: Did Layng Martine really have to tell readers about his wife's incontinence in such detail? I don't doubt the author's love for his wife, but his description of her difficulties cast him as a perfect prince charming and her as a Hallmark heroine. What they overcame seemed merely physical, never of the complicated emotional variety. Martine alludes to problems, but somehow I don't believe that they triumphed over bed-wetting, loss of sex, and an entire life overhaul solely through the power of love. Perhaps I'm too much of a hater, but were I to become a paraplegic, I'd want my boyfriend to stick by me, and maybe even to write about it; I wouldn't want him to write a two-dimensional chronicle of my bed-soiling in the New York Times.
  Filed under: modern love, Layng Martine, car accidents
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