After 10 years of marriage, I am starting to realize that a woman’s wedding ring must be awfully darned heavy — how else to account for the 40+ pounds she gains after the “I Do’s” are done?

A man’s ring? Well, it’s a medical freakin’ marvel, baby, because a man’s ring has the ability to redirect blood flow. All that energy a man used to put into pretending he was listening — while actually counting down the minutes until he could step up from intellectual foreplay to full-frontal frolicking — gets redirected before the “oooooh” part of “I Do” settles into the church carpet.

That moment which represents the culmination of every little girl’s fantasy — when she’s standing at the altar in a dress she’ll wear for 3 hours that costs more than all of the dresses she’s previously worn in her life combined and all eyes are upon her… that moment, in the man-scheme of things, is infinitesimally small and yet infinitely more profound.

Oh, sure, her life and maybe her last name are going to change. Eventually - eventually - she’ll probably begin to pack on the pounds, either before pregnancy or afterwards when she realizes that, if she could do it all over again, the money that went towards her dress should’ve been saved to pay for that post-marital lipo.

But meanwhile, in the blink of a blink of an eye, her man’s entire physiology changed. As she looked up toward him, her eyes fervently shining with pride over how much her real-life “I Do” sounded like the ones she’d rehearsed umpteen times into her pillow — her man’s blood flow got shunted from the part of his brain that used to pretend to listen to a part that actually enables him not to listen ever, ever again.

How else to explain why men who possessed perfect urinary aim when they were mere boyfriends suddenly become, upon marriage, Picassos of the piss hole? Or why the man who used to feign the need to fill up his gas tank so he’d have an excuse to go take a crap at the gas station turns — thanks to his wedding ring — into a man who not only leaves the door open and the fan off when he’s letting the toilet know who’s boss?

And a woman can complain about it until she’s blue in the face — so long as she doesn’t cut off the vaginal or mammary life-support system — but he’ll never hear one bitchified word.

So what’s a girl to do?

Sure, she could lose that 40 pounds and see if that doesn’t make a man listen. But let’s face it, a woman can lose at least 150 pounds in a heartbeat: she just has to file for divorce.

Short of that? Well, she learns to cope. As I have.

And now — because I have nothing better to do with my evenings, apparently — I’m sharing the skills. For my female readers, and my venomously anti-vaginarian bachelor friends, I’ve started a weekly newsletter featuring new recipes; planned weekly dinner menus with a shopping list; house cleaning tips; and more.

The first issue goes out tomorrow. Better sign up while you can. But even if you miss popping my newsletter’s cherry you can always visit me at I Think, Therefore I Blog and sign up for it in the sidebar.

Come to think of it, maybe you should just be visiting me there at ITTIB a bit more often period. Or did that wedding ring on your finger ruin your ability to think, too?

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