People often ask me, "What's the difference between couple hood and babyhood?" In a word? Moisture. Everything in my life is now more moist. Between your spittle, your diapers, your spit-up and drool, you got your baby food, your wipes, your formula, your leaky bottles, sweaty baby backs, and numerous other untraceable sources — all creating an ever-present moistness in my life, which heretofore was mainly dry.

Reiser’s joke hinges on a comic, bodily inventory: the romantic ideal of “couplehood” gives way to the messy material reality of “babyhood.” By reducing the difference to “moisture,” he punctures sentimental narratives of parenting and replaces them with a vivid, sensory truth—life with an infant is defined by constant fluids, leaks, and cleanup. The humor comes from exaggeration and specificity (spittle, diapers, sweaty backs), but it also conveys a genuine shift in identity and domestic order: the adult world that once felt controlled and “dry” becomes permeated by unpredictable needs. The line captures how parenthood reorganizes attention, time, and even one’s tolerance for the unglamorous.