Raise your hand if this has happened to you:
You’re dating a guy and things move into serious relationship territory. You start spending enough time together to take notice of his bathroom habits—you know, once he is comfortable enough to go poo around you. You find yourself perplexed by the amount of time he spends upon the porcelain throne, but you keep your concerns private because you don’t want to embarrass him. Then, eventually, you confess to a close friend that you’re worried about or annoyed with your significant other’s poop schedule, both the frequency and longevity of it. That close friend says, “Ugh, my husband/boyfriend is the same way.” That makes you wonder, do all men have this problem? So you ask another friend, and that friend admits that her significant other also spends an obscene amount of time in the bathroom. Suddenly you realize that it’s a universal problem with a universal question:
WHY. DOES. POOPING. TAKE. MEN. SO. LONG?!
Do they need surgery? Hemorrhoid cream? Are aliens experimenting on them behind the bathroom door?
Were they not taught how to go potty correctly? I mean, as women, we wait until we feel the need to go. We enter the bathroom, drop a deuce, and—BAM!—we’re done. Three to five minutes, tops, barring an emergency. Less than 60 seconds if we’re not in our own home. Women don’t sit on the potty any time we think we might like to poop and wait for one to come around. Is that what men do?!
As women, we love to talk about how we’re building our empires, raising our children right, rah, rah, rah, etc. etc. What we don’t often mention, for our men’s sake, is that we have done most of the heavy lifting while our husband/boyfriend was pooping!
I’ve heard that Mark Zuckerburg and former President Barack Obama have such crazy schedules that they wear the same outfit almost every day, to avoid having one more daily decision to make. How in the world do they make time for their man poops? Do their administrative assistants schedule them in for them? “Yes, sir, from 3:00–3:45 P.M. is pooping time. Then you will change your suit, and at 3:50 you have a conference call.”
I also read that the life expectancy for an American male is now 78 years old. How much of that do you think takes place in the crapper? I mean, do the math:
4 daily trips to the potty x 30 minutes each trip = 120 minutes, or two hours of daily poop time
2 hours of potty time per day x 365 days in a year = 730 hours spent in the bathroom per year
730 hours of annual poop time x 78 years = 56,940 hours of sitting on the throne over the course of a lifetime, which breaks down to 2,372.5 days
2,372.5 days spent pooping in a lifetime ÷ 365 days in a year = 6.5 years
Y’ALL, BY THE END OF THEIR LIVES OUR MEN ARE SPENDING ROUGHLY THE EQUIVALENT OF 6.5 YEARS IN THE BATHROOM.
Maybe I am taking this too far now, but since we’re already discussing it, I have to confess: I am curious about the cleanliness of it all. Do they go, wipe when they’re done, and then just sit there playing on their phones while the output lingers below (because to flush would be a dead giveaway that they’re done and should emerge from the bathroom, right)? Doesn’t the smell bother them?! I mean, ewww!
Ladies, if our men are really OK and they’re not all collectively suffering from hemorrhoids or something requiring surgery, then I want in on this arrangement.
At what point in our lives were we made to feel so guilty about our poop, that we can now slip into a bathroom, let it all out, leave no smell behind, and come out in three minutes flat, leaving everyone else none the wiser?! How is it that men have no shame over their 30-minute bathroom sessions? I want 30-minute poop breaks! I want to be able to take 30-minute poop breaks! Believe me, I have tried! But if am in there for longer than 10 minutes, distant relatives start messaging me about my well-being and even the dog starts scratching the bathroom door to alert my family of my need for rescue.
Now, if all men were charged with the responsibility of getting on their phones and preventing WWIII every time they had to poo, I would be like, “Go! Do that! Save the world from nuclear destruction!” But I’m pretty sure that’s not what’s going on, is it?
Is life so hard and so mundane, that the toilet has become men’s escape? That might be the bigger issue that we need to address. If they really feel that the potty is the only safe place they have to chill, men deserve more than that. I think we could strike a deal. I mean, I don’t know about y’all, but personally I would be willing—as long as he doesn’t abuse the privilege, of course—to offer my husband a timeout chair that he doesn’t have to poop in, where he can just sit and scroll through his phone without my bothering him a few times a day. I mean, as long as I was allowed to place seasonal decorative throw pillows in said timeout chair and got to use it equally as often.
Ladies, we’ve got to get to the bottom of this (no pun intended). I implore each of you to read this post to your poop-master husband/boyfriend. Tell him that this is a safe, judgment-free zone, but you need answers and demand some insight into what’s happening behind those closed bathroom doors. Tell him to text you if he’s uncomfortable having this convo face to face. He can even reply via an emoji story or Morse code if it’s easier. I’m more proficient at emoji, but for this, I would learn Morse code.
