(You may enbiggenate this cartoon by clicking on the detective’s gold shield.)
Bizarro is brought to you today by Love and Death.
Some may find today’s cartoon a bit morbid, but it is my firm belief that most elderly couples who’ve been together for decades secretly wish each other dead.
From an anthropological perspective, humans are not meant to be “married” for more than 20 years. The biological purpose of marriage and monogamy is to ensure the man that any child the woman has belongs to him and ensure the woman that she’ll have help raising her incredibly slow-growing offspring. But since we humans are impossibly complex, mutant apes, we’ve built myriad other functions and expectations into the marriage relationship. Now that we live so much longer than we used to, it causes problems.
Until modern times, one partner or the other (usually the man) died before the relationship became too old. But today it is common for both men and women to live 75 or 85 years or more, and not uncommon for marriages to last 50 years or longer. Sharing your house and your life with the same person for 50 years sounds romantic on a greeting card, but in real life, that would drive me bat-shit bonkers. I tend to get tired of anyone I have to share a space with for too long –– lovers, coworkers, roommates –– and begin to see them as annoying obstacles. Especially when they refuse to close the bag inside the cereal box and my cornflakes get stale. At age 55, I’ve already burned through two marriages and though I was not the one to instigate the demise of either, I did find my nerves fraying after five or six years and secretly wishing my wife would clean up after herself, stop yammering so much while I’m trying to read, or leave at least one square inch of bathroom counter space for something other than her own astoundingly expensive magical youth creams. Yes, at this point of a live-in relationship I become a grumpy asshole. That’s probably why my wives wandered off and who can blame them?