Imagine you're a chimp living in a zoo and one morning your keeper accidentally lets you loose. What is the first thing you'd do? I'd raise holy hell, shriek obscenities at the gaping tourists ("What are you looking at, buster?"), then steal the fastest car in the parking lot and head for the hills.

Last week, Judy, a 37-year-old, 120-pound female chimp faced just such an opportunity. What she did with her newfound freedom was this: She cleaned the bathroom. Actually, she first stopped at the zookeepers' refrigerator for a snack, then she scrubbed their toilet with a brush. And then she rinsed out a sponge and went back to the kitchen and wiped away the messy spots in the refrigerator she'd noticed while she was getting her snack.

Her cleaning rampage ended only when she was knocked out by several tranquilizer darts - note that it took several darts to bring down this primate Martha Stewart. It seems Judy had once been a house-chimp and was trained in the domestic arts. Old habits die hard.

I thought about Judy the chimp as I folded laundry the other morning. I should have been writing, but writing is hard and folding laundry is easy, and someone's got to do it. No one is going to complain (except my conscience) that I didn't write 600 words on any particular day, but I am definitely going to

hear about it if there are no clean underwear about the place.

I remember thinking when my kids were little that as soon as they were both in school full-time, I'd write a novel every year. My youngest is in fifth grade. Alas, the second novel is not yet done.

The truth is, faced with the real-life equivalent of an open cage door - your kids go off to school, say, or you get fired from a job you hate, or you've been dumped by a loser of a boyfriend - most of us don't change our lives in any dramatic fashion. Like Judy, we do what we know. We get a new job. We find a new boyfriend. We fold the laundry.

All of this predictability is a good thing for society. We know what to expect from people. But sometimes that soothing predictability begins to get a little cockeyed. People stop behaving the way we expect them to. They say: To hell with the toilet!

Remember Jennifer Wilbanks, the "Runaway Bride," who a few years ago so desperately wanted out of her elaborate wedding plans that she faked her own kidnapping? The story was all over the talk shows and editorial pages, the subject of endless late-night comedy routines.

When a story like Wilbanks's enters the national mythology, there's a reason for it. As ridiculous as she seemed, a lot of Americans, both male and female, could relate to her predicament. We're raised in a culture that exalts marriage as the highest attainment in life, and so we're filled with anxiety about choosing the right partner to fulfill our marital aspirations.

Ideal vs. reality

We're taught from an early age that marriage should be a lifelong relationship founded on undying romantic love to the perfect partner - gorgeous, intelligent, wealthy (or headed that way), emotionally generous, faithful, capable of producing beautiful and brilliant children, not to mention handy with a toilet brush. In a poll conducted by the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University, 94 percent of never-married singles agreed that "when you marry you want your spouse to be your soul-mate, first and foremost."

The only problem is that this concept has little to do with reality. Hormones and brain chemistry trump cultural ideals. Soul-mates have a way of devolving into roommates. Any neurologist will tell you that romantic love has a short shelf-life, two years at the outside. After that, if you're lucky and picked your spouse wisely, a different region of your brain takes over and a different kind of love glues the relationship together, one based on deep attachment and affection.

But even with the glue of attachment and affection, spouses can be hard to love. They have bad hair when they wake up in the morning and halitosis. They can be fickle and selfish. Your spouse could turn out to be an alcoholic, or abusive, or a serial cheater. (next page »)