Jackie recalls Neal’s hands were shaking the first time he gave her a mix tape, and that on their first date he was too shy to hold her hand at all.

Neal says it was poison oak. He was worried he was going to pass it on. Like I said, I don’t know. I don’t personally have any memory of these things.

There are other things I don’t remember. For instance, in the years that I have known Neal, I don’t remember him ever uttering another woman’s name.

Nor do I remember the two of them ever fighting, particularly when Neal and I lived together. And this is the period I want to discuss. Not the initial Mel Gibson/Julia Roberts lovebird stage, but rather one that I was more intimately involved with and thus am at liberty to discuss with some authority — a period that came nearly a year later, when Neal and I were living in a farmhouse in the woods in a placed called Belchertown — a place which Jackie visited and stayed over regularly — and was, of course, entirely welcome.

Now, I brought along some visual aids. Though it may not look it in the pictures, this house was ready to topple at any minute — several windows were boarded up, the front door lacked a working knob, there was a layer of ladybugs one inch thick in all the windowsills, the entire interior required repainting in order to mask the strange funk with which the walls were coated.

There were rats and spiders and fleas — and additional curios unmentionable before such dignified company.

There were times when we feared the upstairs bathtub was in danger of literally falling through the floor. Beneath the blackened linoleum (what little there was of it) the wood beams had been entirely consumed by various unclassifiable fungal species.

This was the bathroom Jackie was required to use whenever she stayed over . Being, as it was, the better of the two in the house. The other bathroom I will not discuss here.

But Jackie came nevertheless, which to us was clear evidence that here was a girl who possessed a powerful moral fiber and whose strength of character was unmatched — being, as she was, the only woman courageous enough to remain in the house for a period longer twenty minutes.

But still, Jackie endured — this is my point — where any weaker woman would surely have perished…or hit the road. And yet their love flourished.

Now, you may have at this point be wondering why I have gone to such lengths to relay to you the utter squalor and depravity of Neal’s former living quarters — this being their wedding day, after all.

The reasons are as follows:

One: having spent so many months in cohabitation with nature’s less congenial populations, having been nearly ingested whole by chiggers and fleas, having been serenaded at all hours by rats scratching in the walls, and having had their entire repiratory systems strengthened through constant mold spore exposure, Neal and Jackie emerge fully prepared for having children.

Two: they say a marriage must stand upon a firm foundation. This is incorrect. I say let it stand upon as weak and rickety a foundation as possible — one with a flooded basement that lacks heat in the winter and cool air in the summer. One in which the electricity is constantly on the blink due to raccoons chewing on the wires. In short, on which is in danger, at any moment, of complete collapse.

For only under these extreme conditions — in a Belchertown farmhouse shared by five men, may the full worth of a romantic relationship be ascertained. Put it to the test, I say! That we may in the end find ourselves in the presence of a rare and beautiful thing: two people — eternally devoted — about to begin their lives together, with the worst already far behind them, and with nothing but clear, allergen-free skies on the horizon.

To Jackie and Neal!!