Those who retreat and meditate after they’ve touched or been touched, including the self-denying monks, the love-sick dreamers and the excessively analytic.

Followers of id, blind in one eye, x-ray vision in the other, grotesque and enviable.

From the treadmills of life; back in the day this meant arranged marriages; today it means finding someone in a parallel search for compatible conventionality – or unconventionality. The point is lifestyle. Decoration. Economics.

As in a blanket for warmth, a soothing shrug, a calming kiss; at risk for snuggle addiction.

We make a good team – you could see them saying this on a talk show, beaming at each other – running a business, raising kids and dogs (lots of dogs!), and yeh, a little heh-heh nookie-nookie! (the audience hoots and claps).

Kind of like the Team Players, they tend to brag about their love, though usually in comparison to their previous failures, which still smolder, almost visibly.

Why? I just want to ask: why? Why why why why does it matter who speaks first? Do you think maybe she interrupts you, causing you to snap at her, because you hardly give her a chance and she’s had enough? Even if letting off steam on a regular basis in public keeps you from exploding into a zillion humpty dumpty pieces – does that make it OK?

Come on, let’s go home, says the designated driver to the bombed-again spouse. Laughing at jokes that aren’t funny. Excusing her temper as temper, his anxiety as anxiety. Never asking yourself why.

Too old to fight. Too many scores to even. Too much information exchanged. There are pleasures in accommodation. And the most basic companionship.

Commitment? Rather be committed to a mental institution than the institution of marriage. They barely even believe in love, by name at least. Yet she’s got a key to his place and an open invitation when she’s in town.

They never last. They don’t exist. They steam into a cloud, and rain hope, disappointment and embarrassment on the rest of us.

At the end of the party, they hold hands and could almost skip to their car, so glad are they to be out of there and headed back to their pod-room/control center, where they will lie on their bed and look up at the blank screen of their ceiling and tell each other who they talked to and what they ate; they can be catty, kind, anything at all – they can even disagree, but they are one, and the only thing better is the moment they hear that their plans for dinner and a show with two other couples have been cancelled last minute for some benign reason and they are free to stay home and watch TV and be boring as old pajamas whose elastic is beginning to give out.

Yes, dear. No, dear. Genetics, dear. Culture, dear. Unspoken mutual agreement, dear. Children are supposed to be aghast at the way their parents relate to others, dear.

It’s all about her – the moods, the near misses, the occasional win. Or it’s all about him – gunning his grumpy engine, taking off on a 25-dollar tirade, a 50-dollar tirade, a 100-dollar tirade. It’s the defense of your mate at the expense of you. How do you stand it? On one leg, no less?

Yes, she has affairs, and you just gotta ask: is it love or pride that allows him to deny what everyone else knows?

Few would disagree that his voice is the fingernail scratching on the chalkboard of life. Has he always sounded like that? Has she never heard it?

Kid-cutie yum-yum silly snuggle; aw, that’s so…puppy puppy puppy. Don’t be embarrassed. They’re not.

Often the Pursuers in the common Pursued/Pursuer dichotomy that defines many couples, these lovers remain head over heels – at least enough hours a week to conclude that they are, in fact, still madly in love with the object of their desire.

The need can be physical, emotional, familial or historical. It can be described as a disability or not. It can be too much for any one person to handle. Yet the need for help on the part of one and the need to help on the part of the other harmonize eventually, like singers in a weekend choir.

Even after decades of marriage, they wonder often and sometimes aloud: do you love me? Do you like me? Do you still want me? Really want me? Or is it…don’t ask, you dope, just hold tight. And enjoy the fleeting bliss of relief when the other squeezes back.

She is a marsupial from the outback of Australia. He is a comet orbiting Jupiter at temperatures averaging minus 50,000 degrees. They met on line at Whole Foods. How they got there is almost as incredible as how they started talking and why they kept talking as they headed out to the street and decided now was the moment from which they would never look back.