Good skin, dark hair, five year plans… we all have a list of things that we’re looking for in a relationship.
Me? I’m just looking for someone who’s willing to keep their body’s natural food processing private.
Hi, my name is Katy and I’m a fart-ophobic. And for as long as I can remember the practice of releasing your body’s pent up gasses publicly has totally and utterly disgusted me.
Before you write me off as an uptight hater of the a-hole, I’d like to clarify this a bit.
I have no issue with the act of farting itself, I get that it’s a natural process of the body and that it’s necessary for bowel health. But it’s the doing it in front of others, especially people you’re having sex with, that makes me want to run for the heaven scented hills.
“But that’s when you’ve reached real relationship territory,” everyone says. When you can fart and burp and just be truly be yourself in front of each other without caring.
Maybe I’m naive, but I don’t think that’s the marker of a real relationship.
I don’t think getting up and going into another room for 60 seconds is that great an effort.
At some point as an evolving society, we made the decision to dedicate specific rooms in our houses and offices to these actions. They’re called bathrooms, and there’s a bowl in them that is one letter away from being your bowel, and it want’s to know your bum way better than I ever will.
Fart your heart out, but please, I beg of you, do it there.
Surprisingly, you’re probably thinking, I actually managed to find a boyfriend who, for the most part, is very okay with my strict set of rules on this issue. Because believe it or not, he doesn’t want to hear me farting either.
Happy private farters on holiday. Source: provided.
I don't think they're funny. (That's right. The echoing of your anal cavity is not hilarious, wacky music to my ears). He doesn't think they're an achievement worth sharing. It's a relationship win-win.
Currently, we share an apartment slightly bigger than your average shoebox, and aside from one bout of food poisoning, we've managed to stick to the unspoken rules pretty successfully and still maintain a "real" relationship.
In addition to keeping a veil over what your bowel is doing for romantic purposes, farting is also kind of unhygienic.
Recently, Dr Karl tested whether or not farts could actually contaminate the air, or if people like me were just being princesses.
The test required a person to fart onto two petri dishes, once with pants on, and once with pants down. Within 24 hours, the pants-down petri dish grew visible lumps of bacterial growth, while the pants-up petri dish showed none, with scientists believing that clothing acts as a filter.
So basically, if you're lying in bed naked and a fart occurs, you're set to be inadvertently sprayed with the bacteria of your plus one's poo shards. And if they're lying on the couch farting, they're quite literally sitting in a puddle of their own bacteria.
Can't you just smell the romance?
Dr Karl knows that poo flies. Source: Facebook.
Called me old fashioned, but I think there's merit in keeping a little bit of mystery in a relationship; a value in not knowing every single thing about someone. Like when they cut their toe nails, for example, or how regularly they wax their legs, or how many times they've peed in a day.
In that category also falls being able to avoid being intimately acquainted with what another person ate for lunch.
Take offence at me and my primness and my uptight relationship rules if you want, see if I care. I'm not the one inhaling my partner's poo shards.