Welcome to the Only Marriage Test that Works

Skip the therapist. Just check the floor.

I have a theory about marriage, and it’s not scientific and it hasn’t been peer-reviewed. No one is going to publish it in The Journal of Relationship Psychology or cite it at a conference. The test is this: How do you feel when you see his underwear on the floor?

I’ve been married three times so I guess that makes me an expert on what makes a failed or successful marriage. If anything, it’s given me data.

But before the husbands, there was my father.

Out in the world, he was the kind of man you noticed before you heard him and remembered long after he left. He wore custom-made three-piece suits, Italian silk ties, and enough Aramis cologne that the EPA could have opened a case. His hair was always perfect because my mother saw to that, so devotedly that she once fell off a stool while combing it and knocked herself unconscious. The dark glasses were always on, mostly because underneath them were lenses so thick that at 15, those round frames earned him his mob name, Banjo. He had been hiding behind them ever since, which if you think about it, solved two problems at once: Nobody knew what he was thinking, and nobody knew he could barely see them anyway.

He was a bodyguard to men like Frank Sinatra, and he moved in a world where appearance was armor.

And then he came home.

It was like watching Superman find a phone booth and come out the other side as an Italian Clark Kent. The suit came off. The tie came off. The dark glasses switched to clear ones, but the gold cornicello, the Italian horn charm that guarded against the evil eye, stayed around his neck.

What remained was tighty-whities, a white ribbed sleeveless undershirt, and an enormous quantity of body hair running from his neck to his ankles. The hair was so dark and abundant that it made him look like an ape who had just made parole.

In the mornings, his underwear would be by the side of their bed. I’d walk past it without seeing it, because it had always been there and always would be. It was just a part of the decor of my parents’ bedroom, a square of white cotton on the brown shag carpet, as unremarkable as the gold-legged nightstand or the crucifix on the wall.

My mother never complained about it. My teenage understanding of this was damaged for life when I asked her how someone like her could be so attracted to this loud, bossy, intimidating, misogynistic man. She was a former dancer who kept her tap shoes in the trunk of the car just in case, with long legs and blonde hair and a smile that belonged in the movies.

“You don’t know what your father is like behind closed doors,” she told me.

“And I never want to know,” I said.

But I can assume now, with total confidence, that he passed the underwear test. Those tighty-whities on the floor were, for her, evidence of the man she loved.

Which brings me to my own data.

My first husband was Italian and cute in a Billy Crystal kind of way, and my father adored him. I was young and I wanted out of my father’s house, and marrying a man my father loved seemed like a reasonable escape route. I knew before the wedding that nothing was going to make me feel a sexual attraction to this man because kissing him felt like kissing a cousin.

He was funny in a way that made strangers feel like old friends. He loved the outdoors, and his signature look was cutoff jean shorts with his colorful print cotton boxers always hanging past the frayed denim hem.

He was the kind of guy who woke up on a Saturday morning, rolled over, and said: “Pull my finger.” He wasn’t joking. What followed was exactly what you think.

I would look at his boxers on the floor, inside-out and wrinkled, and feel exactly what his pull my finger routine made me feel: an annoying little cricket chirp that over the years got louder until I couldn't hear anything else

The second husband was a rock musician. Gorgeous blue eyes, blonde shag hair, dressed like he had stepped out of an English rock magazine. Underneath the tight jeans were wild animal print bikini briefs, the kind I assume Tommy Lee wears.

He later became a slurring, staggering drunk.

There’s nothing that will cure you of finding leopard-print underwear sexy faster than watching a guy wear it and nothing else while stumbling across your bedroom floor. The hot bass player I had once watched command a stage had become someone whose bikini briefs on the floor next to our bed made me want to run as fast as the cheetah the look was stolen from.

The third husband is a doctor. He wears white, classic Hugo Boss briefs. The man has opinions about things like expensive knives, shoe trees, and the thread count of toilet paper. His underwear is no exception. I moved into his home, which meant navigating someone else’s life, his closets, his routines and his hierarchy of kitchen equipment.

I remember the first morning I woke up in our house, a phrase I was just getting used to, and saw his underwear on the floor. White briefs, slightly twisted at the waistband, the way underwear gets when a man steps out of it in a hurry.

I stood in the doorway in one of his button-down pajama shirts and looked at it. I felt something warm, something close to a sexual feeling. I was swooning over underwear.

I’ve started asking around about this, informally, over wine or in the car on the way home from somewhere. The conversations usually start with “Can I ask you something weird?” I’ve posed the question to friends in long marriages, short ones, marriages that are thriving and marriages that are audibly in trouble.

The results are not scientifically significant, but they are consistent.

My friend whose marriage has been on the rocks for a few years told me that she and her husband sleep in separate bedrooms now, connected by a shared bathroom where his underwear still ends up on the floor. Enormous underwear stretched out and shapeless in a way that feels like a metaphor for everything that has gone wrong. She cannot bring herself to touch it. She uses a broom handle to move it to the hamper.

I didn’t laugh when she told me this, because I know what it means when a woman picks up her husband’s underwear with a broom handle. Once disgust gets that specific, it doesn't go away.

The women I know who are still lit up by their husbands, not just going through the motions, tend to use a specific word when the underwear comes up. They call it sexy. It's evidence of him, proof his body was in this room and will be again tonight, and this small cotton proof of that is something worth smiling at.

The women who are miserable describe a revulsion that goes beyond the domestic. They’re not annoyed about dirty laundry but enraged by its presence.

Here’s what I think the underwear is about. It is the garment closest to the body, to the specific part of his body that is, depending on the day and the man and how many years you’ve been married, either the source of your greatest pleasure or a non-event you could live the rest of your life without encountering.

You can spend years in therapy unpacking your attachment style, reading books about love languages, downloading apps that send you daily prompts to check in with your partner. Or you can just notice what happens in your body when you see his underwear on the floor.

Feel something warm? You're fine. Feel nothing? Pay attention. And if there's a voice in your head muttering lazy, inconsiderate, son-of-a-bitch, pack a bag. It's already over, and the underwear has been trying to tell you this for months.

After 21 years of marriage, I still swoon over Hugo Boss briefs on the floor. My friend reaches for a broom handle.

My father dropped dead of a heart attack on his way home from the tailor, carrying his three-piece suits over his arm, tighty-whities underneath.