True love is a ceramic Irish Setter in your backyard
By Nicole Freire

Gather round boys and girls and listen to a story of true love.

Surely you've heard about fancy wedding dresses, engraved invitations, tasteless wedding cake, and grooms who faint.

Ceramic Irish Setter

And you've also probably heard tales of computer dating, blind dates, and love at first sight. Couples who have been married 30, 40, 50, heck, even 60 years, still holding hands and kissing in public.

But have you heard the one about the two-foot tall ceramic Irish Setter? Because that one has true love written all over it.

That old line "in good times and in bad times"? Turns out that means not only sticking by someone when they have the flu, or lost their job, or wear funny hawaiian shirts. It also means listening to their stories over and over, bringing them coffee in the morning, and letting them watch ultimate fighting on tv. It also means the celebratory toast, the positive pregnancy test, the comfort of having someone to kiss goodnight.

But it also means that someday, when your true love brings home the life-size ceramic Irish Setter that used to sit in his now-deceased grandmother's living room and wants to put it IN YOUR BACKYARD? You say yes.

Yes to the wedding vows, yes to the lean years and the fat years, yes to putting their plate in the dishwasher instead of the sink. Yes to the good and yes to the bad. Yes to crabby moods and tears, yes to bowls of cereal for dinner, yes to leaving the light on when you come home in the dark. Yes to overdrawn checking accounts, yes to putting gas in the car when it's almost empty, yes to buying the right kind of dryer sheets. Yes to you and yes to me. And always, always, yes to us.

And yes, I don't mind the Irish Setter in my backyard. Not anymore.

Nicole Freire is a freelance writer who lives in Santa Barbara