Another Unlikely Love Story
by Bill Shein

Regular readers of this newspaper may recall an unusually personal column that appeared in this space precisely one year ago. Titled "An Unlikely Love Story," it told of the improbable romantic relationship that had, suddenly and unexpectedly, consumed my life.

The tale appeared in print thanks to broadminded editors who believe, as I do, that a chaste exploration of the mysteries of love is entirely suitable for publication in a family newspaper.

In case you missed the story, or my effusive, Tom Cruise-like appearances on "Oprah," "Live with Regis and Kelly," "Dr. Phil," and "The News Hour with Jim Lehrer," I penned what the Nobel Prize judges would praise as "a refreshing and uninhibited description of love in the modern age," and that Ebert and Roeper would recommend with "all four heart chambers up, way up!"

Admittedly, it seemed inexplicable: A man was romantically involved with his Internet pop-up blocker? Yet perhaps it's the inexplicability of love that makes it so powerful.

As a river of endorphins swept us away, I assumed our union would last forever and shared the details with the world.

So it is with some embarrassment that I must announce the end of the storied relationship that inspired Nicholas Sparks' tender novel, "Let's Clear Out Those Tear Ducts, People!" And no, it didn't end because my pop-up blocker cheated on me with another Web browser.

My friends, the shocking truth is that not long after the movie version of Sparks' book won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, I fell completely in love with someone else: the comma. With uncharacteristic coldness, I simply walked out on my pop-up blocker and dove into the loving embrace of a punctuation mark.

Now, many have long suspected that my relationship with the comma went beyond the normal professional association between writer and grammatical structure. It's true that we have not been discreet; even a cursory scan of my work reveals an abundance of commas that, in some instances, are clearly unnecessary — like the commas placed on either side of "in some instances" just moments ago.

And it's true that my previous romantic entanglements with punctuation did not last (though in some quarters they remain the stuff of writerly legend). But after a suggestive flirtation with the ellipses; a short but intense fling with the exclamation point; a scandalous one-night stand with the semi-colon and her fraternal twin sister, the colon, it is the simple, unpretentious comma with whom I plan to spend the rest of my days.

What more could a writer want? She's always at my fingertips, ready to help when it's time for a breath-catching pause, a readable list, or the addition of those extra sentence clauses I love so much. To some, her easy availability might seem pushy. But to me — a man who chafes against the miserly norm of proper sentence length — she's a goddess who can do no wrong.

She's not abrupt or demanding like the period — that self-centered wench who, on our one and only dinner date, rudely insisted that everything stop in her presence. And the passive-aggressive behavior of the curvaceous question mark, with whom I cohabited for some time, was too much to bear. (She answered all my questions with queries of her own, effectively turning our relationship into a cross between psychotherapy and an Abbott & Costello routine.)

I've known the comma for years. But after a surprisingly intense argument with a copy editor over use of the serial (or "Oxford") comma, I realized the depth of my affection for that little dot and her sexy "curving down and to the left" thing.

We'll marry soon, using the popular line from Kahlil Gibran's "The Prophet" in our wedding vows: "Let there be spaces in your togetherness." When happily married to the sweet, lovable comma, how could there not be?

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Bill Shein thinks Strunk & White's "The Elements of Style" is a beautiful love story.

(This column originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle newspaper on December 7, 2005. Join a discussion about this column in Bill's blog. And read Bill's previous column, "All News is Good News").