In addition to being one of the funniest women on the planet, my friend Sally is in love. So totally and sickeningly in love that she sends me these gushy emails all the time, the sort of emails that contain sentences like this:

“I can’t focus just now because his aftershave is still lingering in my house and it’s been longer than I remember since I went to bed with whisker burns! Yee-Haw!”

(Sorry, Sal, but you did write it.)

Which got me to thinking: I can remember (vaguely) when the sight of my husband’s scruffy face was a total turn-on. I’m talking pull-off-the-highway-and-take-me-now sort of stuff. Then seemingly out of nowhere, it became, “Don’t TOUCH me with that face. It’s like kissing wet sandpaper.” There was no gradual lessening of lust, no moment of neutrality (“Scruff? I could take it or leave it.”), just a straight shot from hotter-than-hell to not-getting-any-until-you-shave.

The upside to this is that foreplay in my house has been whittled down to a simple, single signal: The sound of the electric razor.