Riddle: What’s the opposite of a breakup?

Answer: Frequently married — to each other! — porn star Annie Sprinkle and butch multi-media artist Elizabeth Stephens.

Yep, the super-committed couple is at it again — for the fourth time, and they’re counting. Yesterday marked the momentous occasion of Annie and Beth’s wedding — their fourth annual, this one with a green eco-love theme.

As part of a seven-year project of their collaboration the Love Art Lab, Sprinkles and Stevens get married once a year for seven years. Each wedding corresponds to the color and properties of one of the seven chakras.

Just a few of the reasons Annie and Beth’s relationship might inspire the pants off you:

They met when they were younger but fell in love “later in life;” they are a successful collaborative team; they turn love and sex into art; they aren’t afraid of love or commitment, or at least do a bang-up job of overcoming those fears; the hell — the first three times – with the ban on gay marriage; Annie beat breast cancer in their first year of marriage; they are openly sex-positive; they tried to have a baby but when it didn’t work opted for a black lab; they encourage others by sharing their story; they are just cute as pie.

And now that gay marriage has been legalized in California (finally!) their lastest nuptial might spread love into the world with more than costumes and performance art. After all, what says “Congratulations on your continued connubiality” more than shared health benefits and hospital visitation rights?

You know you want to see pictures from weddings one, two and three….

Now, thanks to the California Supreme Court, you can — as you’ve likely heard by now — get married somewhere other than Massachusetts. Yes, there may be icky political repercussions down the line, but for now let us just say: mazal tov!

Mind Hacks recently featured a highly amusing husband and wife rating chart from the 1930s, invented by marriage counselor George W. Crane, MD, Ph.D. How it works: your spouse earns merit or demerit points based on his or her behaviors and characteristics. Some (“Snores”) are things we can still relate to, while the rest offer a curious peek into the norms and expectations of that era (demerits for a husband who “talks of efficiency of his stenographer or other women” or a wife who “fails to sew on buttons or darn socks regularly”).

Crane aimed to be “scientific” in the development of this test; true to form, according to the American Psychological Association, he started the Scientific Marriage Foundation, which took a “scientific” approach to marriage and claimed to have set up more than 5,000 marriages.

I wonder what a modern version of this questionnaire would look like. Demerits for “brings laptop to bed”?

I love the Internet. It is indeed a beautiful tool, allowing you to research information efficiently and to communicate with an ever-expanding global network. And now, of course, as Switched.com reminds us, you can also use it to break up with your significant other. (That is, if you’re momentarily unable to text. Rrowr!)

Have we really gotten that lazy? Have our communication skills gotten that crappy? Are we just too chicken for — never mind a face-to-face — a phone-to-phone? Why I remember back in the day when I would take a deep breath, review my written speech, pick up my rotary phone and proceed to break hearts. Kids these days! All they have to do is change their Facebook status! Though, I suppose there’s always room for creativity, like the woman who was dumped on Wikipedia who sold her ex-boyfriend’s stuff on eBay. Now that, that’s e-theater.

On the upside, as Switched’s roundup also reminds us, the Internet has also created the opportunity for creative marriage proposals. Remember when CmdrTaco at Slashdot got down on virtual bended knee? Almost seems quaint now. My current favorite is this fake iPhone commercial. So iCute! Now if someone would propose to me in the form of one of those adorable ads for Sonic, I’d be the happiest girl on the planet.

Gal talking loudly on phone: “I’ve fallen in love so many times and they all have wives! It’s like, even if you can convince someone that you’re the one, they always have someone else. I wanna be like, ‘Why can’t you just annul your marriage so that you can sleep with me?’”

The other night I swung by the legendary Algonquin Hotel for a discussion — sadly, not at the round table — on the new book Sex and Sensibility: Ten Women Examine the Lunacy of Modern Love…in 200 Cartoons. (Not to be confused with this Sex and Sensibility, which contains an essay by BG’s alter ego entitled “Someone Old, Someone Blue.”)

Anyway: gasp! A gaggle of cartoonists (including BG idol Roz Chast!) on a mission to figure out this whole love thang? Sounds like BG’s got a backup team! Much of the group’s discussion actually centered on whether or not men and women find different things funny, and why that might be. (No final conclusions were drawn, but everyone found the discussion funny, so I guess that’s saying something.)

Liza Donnelly, the book’s editor — and a staff cartoonist at the New Yorker (thus a superhero of sorts) — also mentioned to me that she is working on another book of cartoons about marriage with her fellow-cartoonist husband. Will it be full of actual solutions? Probably not. But is it fun to imagine the two of them hanging around their apartment saying things like, “You don’t have to go to this party. It’s ‘Men Optional,'” or “Now that our last is off to college, could you tell me who the hell you are?” Oh yeah.

This Broadsheet post at Salon.com by FOBG Sarah Hepola is so delightful and spot-on, we’re just going to cut and paste the whole damn thing.

Good news for single women between the ages of 25 and 44 — not only are you a booming demographic, but you also might not be a poor and luckless lonelyheart. Go figure. All this, and you get your own buzzword, too! According to the Guardian:

“‘Freemales’ — manless women who are happy to remain so for the present at least — are now a force to be reckoned with and are overturning the dated Bridget Jones image of the lonely woman staring despondently at an empty Chardonnay bottle. They are too busy living life to the full to make time for ‘Mr Mediocre’ and the last thing on their minds is, ‘Will I find Mr Right today?'”

Well, good for them. I’m always skeptical of these trend pieces, but it’s nice to hear news stories about women who are actually happy with their current situation. Too many articles depict a stricken, desperate existence for us single women. (Lori Gottlieb, anyone?) But not all single women are fumbling for the panic button. In fact, a new report in Britain states that while the number of women living alone between 25 and 44 doubled in the past two decades, “more than two-thirds of people questioned in a recent survey believed they did not need a partner to enjoy a happy and fulfilled life.”

Now, let’s admit that “freemales” is a terrible buzzword. It sounds like the kind of account you get when you join Yahoo. (I have been amusing myself by pronouncing the word like “tamale.” Sorry, just living life to the fullest! You know how we freemales get!) Apparently, I am on the “terrible buzzword” beat: It was only last week I wrote about “thrisis,” the acute anxiety of mid-thirtysomethings freaking out about their future. But since we do so much reporting on what is tough and frustrating and painful about being a woman, I thought it was worthwhile to hear that some news, dumb buzzword notwithstanding, isn’t so bad. As one single woman quoted in the article noted: “It’s not difficult being single. It’s not lonely. It’s pleasurable.”

By the way, in my experience, it is occasionally difficult being single. Rumor has it, that’s true of marriage, too.

Now that Eliot Spitzer has resigned, we can put this sex business behind us and get back to BUSINESSbusiness.

Oh, wait.

First we find out that a former aide to former New Jersey governor James McGreevey has come forward, classily, to allege that he was the third wheel, as it were, in a series of three-way “sex romps” with Mr. McGreevy and his ex-wife-to-be, Diana Matos McGreevey. (Or, more to the point, that she was the third wheel.) My first reaction to this revelation (which the missus has denied, by the way) was a resounding “TMI!”

Then we hear about the Patersons. We hear a LOT about the Patersons. Boils down to this: things got rocky. He had affairs. So did she. They dealt.

Then I realized: this is more than a matter of TMI. The universe, my friends, is trying to tell us something. That we should focus as much as possible on the prurient details of politicians’ private utterly human failings — failings that are not at odds with their ability to govern or gain public trust — instead of on ending poverty and war? No, the other thing: remember how easy it was to judge Silda Spitzer? With these new revelations (regardless of their veracity) we are reminded: you never, ever know.

Now can we please get back to work ?

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: With every breaking political sex scandal — and the ensuing awkward press conference/photo opp — it becomes more and more tempting to imagine little thought balloons over the heads of the apparently stoic, forbearing wives. (“Well, this explains a lot.” “Game face game face game face.” “Dude. Diapers?”)

And man, is it easy to judge. The wives, not the husbands. (Well, them too.) What are they doing at the press conference at all? What sort of public display of solidarity do they possibly owe these guys? Can they really be such doormats? Why aren’t they home changing the locks?

In situations like these, though, I think we’d do well to remember the wise words of Bridget Jones’s friend Magda. “No one from the outside ever really understands what makes them work.” Really, who knows what has gone on Chez Spitzer? Maybe she is cheating too. Maybe he promised her a quick and clean divorce if she’d do just this one thing. Maybe she is even acting out of savvy self-interest, as Anne Applebaum suggests at Slate: “I can see one clear advantage to this option: It’s all over quickly. And no one asks you for a follow-up interview. You appear once—and then you vanish forever, along with your husband’s career. If you’ve been clever about it, you’ve kept your maiden name and can thus return to your own career. Those who make other, more attention-getting choices will later be forced back into the limelight to explain themselves, which is gruesome.” That, or if you simply don’t appear at all, you can bet they’ll come after you.

I’m not saying she should or shouldn’t show up; I’m just saying that in a scandal such as this, her conduct, of all people’s, is not for us to judge. (I’m talking to YOU, lady I just heard on WNYC saying that this whole thing was Mrs. Spitzer’s fault in the first place because she didn’t kink things up enough.) The real thing to question is not each wife’s motive, or her backbone. The real thing to question, I think, is why these women are expected to show up in the first place. (And what will happen someday when the “stoic wife” is the husband.)

Also via Broadsheet:

Every so often you wonder if they come up with the title first, then the show.

The press release in question from WE tv:

“Understandably, every bride wants her wedding day to be picture perfect and that means that her gown must be stunning and fit like a glove. A new Cornell study reports that more than 70 percent of brides-to-be are on a mission to lose weight before their big day. All-new series, WE tv’s BULGING BRIDES [Yep!] premieres an all-new episode on Sunday, February 24 at 10pm / 9c. … The latest installment … follows Heidi, a constant procrastinator [and bad person], who has been putting off plans for her upcoming nuptials [because FAT people are shiftless].

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