[1] It was our first date together. The man who was to become my husband, the man I call Ed, got up from the table within minutes of his arrival and excused himself to go wash his hands. I found this adorable. He was like a little raccoon, leaning over the stream to tidy himself before eating. At the same time I found it odd, as it typically would not occur to me to wash my own hands before a meal, unless I'd spent the afternoon coal mining, say, or running an offset printing press.

[2] It was as this same dinner that I made the unfortunate decision to share my philosophy of bath towels, which holds that you needn't wash them very often because you're clean when you use them.

[3] We both sensed something of a hygiene gap, and not wanting to alarm one another, spent our first six months trying to hide our true selves. Ed didn't tell me how he'd replace the toilet seat whenever he moved into a new place, on the grounds that he "didn't know who'd been sitting on it." He said nothing when I used the Designated Countertop Sponge to wash the dishes and Designated Dishwashing Sponge to clean the bathtub, acts I now know to be tantamount to a bioterror attack. For my part, when I dropped food on the floor I'd throw it away instead of picking it up and eating it, and I'd clean the spot where it landed, albeit with the wrong sponge.

[4] As time went by, we reverted to our true selves and the Hygiene War commenced. More than anything else, it was a war of perception. Ed has crud vision, and I don't notice filth. Ed sees it everywhere. I am reasonably convinced that Ed can actually see bacteria. Like any normal couple, we refused to accept each other's differences and did whatever we could to annoy the other person. I flossed my teeth in bed and drank from the OJ container. Ed insisted on moving our vitamins out of the bathroom and into the kitchen, where the germs are apparently less savage.