For years, clergy, sociologists and turtle ranchers have debated the secret to a successful marriage. Finally, once and for all, the three groups have put their minds, bodies and kidneys together to find the definitive answer. They discovered that a successful marriage is directly associated with the contents of the wedding vows.

For example, if your vows start like one of the following, you and your spouse can count on a century of unrivaled marital bliss; a love that can cure the sick and turn hatred into diamonds:

• Today, I shall marry my friend, the one I laugh with, live for, dream of, French, pretend is a super-intelligent tricycle with humanlike qualities…

• My love, when we first met, I thought you were just like all the other pirates I’d slept with…

• At this time I wish to profess my undying affection for you in front of God, our families, our friends, those dictionary salesmen, that family of ventriloquists, this handful of silver dollars and actor/activist Peter Coyote.

• Before ours, no two sets of genitals fit together so perfectly…

• I know it sounds cliché, but I can’t help but say that I always pictured mail-order brides being delivered in big wooden crates filled with straw…

Consequently, if the your wedding vows even remotely begin like one of the following, you’ll find yourselves plotting a murder/suicide within months.

• A wise man once said that marriage is like a Jimmy Smits tribute band being forced to play Ultimate Frisbee with a Cold War reenactment society…

• Oh my precious lover, who could’ve predicted that two years after you purposefully botched my kidney transplant just so you could see me again, we’d be standing here together…

• I think my feelings today would be best expressed through the forgotten art of interpretive somersaulting…

• As your spouse, I promise to love you, cherish you, respect you, discover a fifth ocean and name it after you, talk Randy Newman into only writing songs about you and run for congress so I can introduce a bill requiring that all cell phones bear likeness to you.

• I’d like to begin by admitting to you and to all of the wonderful people who have come here to witness our holy union that during the corndog eating contest that decided who my betrothed would be, I was secretly rooting for you the whole time…

***