Cupid’s bullet Is it okay to cram six years of marriage into a single month? BY CHRIS WRIGHT

I’ve had nicer strolls. Fourteen crisscrossed blocks through a stinging monsoon, the water sloshing about in my inadequate shoes. But I had no choice. I had to meet K. It was imperative. "We really should get that DVD back to the store," I’d said to her earlier, my brow knitted in a businesslike way. "It’s already overdue." The DVD in question, Pieces of April, hadn’t been that good, and you hate to pay late fees for a movie you didn’t like, right? Right. So there I was, drenched to the teeth, rushing to meet K so we could go back to my place and pick up that DVD. Right.

As it turned out, K and I didn’t go back to my place at all. We went back to hers. Even now, Pieces of April sits atop my television set, silently accruing penalties. But that wasn’t the point. Despite the fact that our romance was barely three weeks old, and that we had just spent four straight days together, K and I had just wanted to see each other that night. The DVD was a ruse. And we needed one. We need all the ruses we can get right now. See, K and I have both fallen victim to TMTS syndrome. Too Much Too Soon. It’s a sickness. But how do you know when you have it?

There are certain mathematical equations that can be applied to fledgling relationships. If you divide, for instance, the number of weeks you’ve been seeing someone by the number of days you’ve spent together without a break, the number you arrive at — the See Quotient (SQ) — should never be less than one. Currently, the SQ for K and me is 0.35, well below the accepted level. Similarly, the number of times you say "Hi" to each other on any given day should never exceed the number of days you’ve been going out. One recent Sunday, K and I said "Hi" to each other 45 times, twice the allotted amount.

But not all the symptoms of TMTS are so readily quantifiable. On the "Hi"-heavy Sunday mentioned above, K and I had stood on her porch drinking beer, perfectly acceptable behavior. What wasn’t acceptable, however, was that we began discussing how the next day would mark our three-week anniversary. This minor infraction reached felony status when, a few moments later, we simultaneously said, "Happy anniversary." Clearly, we needed help. But would we seek it? Like hell we would. "Hi," we said, lying in bed that night. "Hi."

Help, however, has a way of arriving even when it isn’t asked for. "You’ve seen how much of her?" asked a friend of mine recently. By then, we were on five straight days. Upon hearing this, my friend rolled her eyes in an Oh-Lordy way. "Be careful." But why should we? Sure, it felt a tad awkward when K’s roommate came home to find me wearing a girly T and sweats, my own clothes in the wash downstairs. I suppose it’s a little odd that K peed in front of me by week two. Then there’s the fact that we’ve already established a division of labor in the kitchen. The fact is, though, we’re having fun. Where’s the harm in that?

Actually, there are perils associated with TMTS. For one thing, by seeing so much of each other at such an early stage, K and I are establishing an artificial sense of familiarity. You cannot truly get to know someone simply by cramming six years of marriage into a single month. Should K reveal a penchant for clubbing baby seals in the coming weeks, or should she discover my tendency to pick my nose and hide the evidence under the alarm clock, the resulting break-up will be made all the harder because of the intimacy we’ve established. Far better to eye each other warily across the expanse of what we don’t know about each other than to pretend that expanse doesn’t exist.

And there are indeed all sorts of things K and I don’t know about each other, things that reveal themselves in increments as we go about our already-established routines. The other day, for example, I discovered that my new girlfriend owns a CD of Chicago’s greatest hits. Meanwhile, she recently accompanied me on a frantic odyssey to obtain a videotape of a soccer game I’d missed. Taken on their own, K’s devotion to dreadful ’70s rock and my obsession with English soccer are far from being deal breakers, but what if they in turn reveal other inclinations? What if K starts dressing like Stevie Nicks? What if I change my name to Chris Beckham? Could we survive that?

The thing is, there are still an awful lot of what-ifs in this relationship, even if K does know how many bowls of cereal I eat in the morning (three), even though I’m fully aware that she’s an advocate of those toothpaste tubes that separate, at the nozzle, the blue paste from the white. Even now, as our SQ dwindles further, it occurs to me that I really have no idea who this person is. How could I? The night K and I decided to abandon Pieces of April, I sat across from her in a bar and searched her face, trying to get a sense of whom she felt she was looking at. I couldn’t, and this worried me a little. Maybe, I thought, I should just go home after all. I didn’t.

The next morning, as K and I walked to the T, she took my hand and we began to talk about the mundane things that couples talk about — what we had to do that day, the itchy sweater I was wearing, puddles. Too much too soon? Who cares? It felt good. "Big day at work tomorrow," K said finally. "I’ll have to sleep at home tonight." The implication was that I wouldn’t be sleeping there with her. "Oh, right, sure," I responded. "I’m meeting a friend anyway." Just then, I was aware of my hand in hers, and of the rain that found its way beneath the umbrella we shared. And that was it. In the space of a single step, we were strangers again.

Chris Wright can be reached at cwright[a]phx.com