Taking Time for Teeth

The other day I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and gave my teeth a little lecture. I’ll spare you the details, but the main theme was, “Honestly, you guys are an awful lot of trouble.”

If we didn’t have teeth – if there were no such thing – and someone invented them, and tried to market them to the general population, I expect the company would be out of business very soon.  I just do not believe they would be a big seller.

It’s not that teeth don’t have any benefits. On the whole, I think they are an excellent idea, and they come in useful on many occasions, such as when you have something to bite. No, it’s the maintenance on teeth that would make them hard to sell.

Tooth salesman: “Well, you’re going to need to clean them at least twice a day; better yet, every time you use them. You’ll have to buy these special brushes – you’ll need a new one every couple months or so – and this special cleaning paste.  And there’s a special string – this floss here – that you need to use to scrape between each little tooth.  Oh, and you need to take the teeth themselves into a repair specialist twice a year to be checked out. That’ll cost you. It’s usually only moderately painful, though. Really.”

Prospective customer: “Um, uh.  I’m not so sure . . . you know, this liquid diet isn’t so bad . . .”

For me, and I suspect, for most people, there is no piece of art, no furniture, no vehicle or appliance on earth that has so much appeal that I would buy it if it required that kind of upkeep.

And yet we all have teeth. And, for the most part, we invest that kind of care into them. Why?  Because we have been told, from the time we were preschoolers, that we must spend a few minutes every day taking care of our teeth or they will cause us great pain and we may eventually lose them completely. So we brush, and maybe even floss, and we use fluoride, and we visit the dentist, because we really are rather attached to our teeth.

So I’ve been thinking: maybe that level of maintenance makes sense when it’s for things that we expect to last a good while. In our low-maintenance, disposable-goods world, it is worth remembering that there are a few things that are designed to hold up for the long haul. One of those is teeth. Another is marriage.

A few minutes of relaxed conversation, a kiss, and some words of love are the marriage equivalent of tooth brushing. Is it asking too much for us to make a habit of it a couple of times a day? When a problem seems stuck in our relationships, are we willing to floss it out before it does painful damage? A sincere apology is better than a toothpick for getting rid of decay-causing gunk. How about getting out for a checkup occasionally? Even pretty serious damage can be repaired, if you are willing to do what it takes. If it’s worth it for your pearly whites, isn’t it worth it for your most important relationship?


I once saw a sign in a dentist’s office that said, “Ignore your teeth and they’ll go away.”  Change the word ‘teeth’ to ‘spouse’, and it would still be true. Marriages that are neglected get rotten and stinky.

So, here’s some advice from someone who has done her share of apologizing, but wishes she’d started flossing earlier: take care of your teeth, take care of your marriage. That may be the real secret to a healthy smile.