Hugh and I have been together for so long that in order to arouse extraordinary passion, we need to engage in physical combat. Once, he hit me on the back of the head with a broken wineglass, and I fell to the floor pretending to be unconscious. That was romantic, or would have been had he rushed to my side rather than stepping over my body to fetch the dustpan.

In Sedaris’s trademark deadpan, the speaker exaggerates the problem of keeping long-term love “exciting” by pushing it into absurd, violent melodrama. The humor comes from the mismatch between the language of romance (“extraordinary passion,” “romantic”) and the banal reality of domestic life (cleaning up glass with a dustpan). The punch line—Hugh stepping over the “unconscious” body to tidy first—satirizes how intimacy can shift from theatrical passion to practical caretaking, and how partners can become desensitized to each other’s bids for attention. Beneath the joke is an affectionate portrait of a relationship where routine, irritation, and love coexist.