You’re out with your wife on a Saturday night, making a broader point about your relationship, when you use the word “ensorcelled” to describe her effect on you. And she interrupts you and laughs, insisting that there is no such word. But damnit, you know it’s a word. Indeed, you explain that you chose it over alternatives like “enchanted” or “charmed” because to you it implies a darker magic at work.

But she will have none of it. And you’re immediately irritated, because she may know how to fix a baby born without a butthole, but you know words – especially nerdy words that are likely to have appeared in fantasy dreck written in the 1980s by the likes of Piers Anthony or Raymond Feist. Indeed, she of all people knows your prowess with words, and also your self-asserted tendency to be right about pretty much anything, but certainly things you actually know. So the fact that she would doubt you on this point – in the middle of your relatively sweet monologue on the nature of your love for her, no less – is maddening.

Normally, you would consult your smartphone to resolve such a disagreement. But it’s date night, and you have used your phone several times already – uploading the photo of the ladies room sign to Instagram, writing that Facebook post about the cowboy who liked your shirt, looking up the list of greatest hits from 90s country singer Mark Chestnut, and taking those selfies that you ultimately deleted because you’re a Fatty Fatterton. So if you get your phone out one more time while you’re supposed to “be here now” and spend time with her, you’ll tear a hole in the fabric of the space-time continuum and more importantly, your marriage. So you have to agree to disagree for the moment, resolving to circle back later and vindicate yourself.

But you forget.

And then it’s Sunday, and you’re in the middle of your trip to Target with your two youngest kids. And they are asking to buy a bunch of bullshit. And you just got him a new toothbrush. And what’s wrong with her current lunchbox? And watermelon toothpaste, seriously? And in the middle of your fight against their almost pathological consumerism, the memory of the vocabulary dispute appears and hovers in your mind like a dragonfly over a crowded public pool. And you stop in the middle of the frozen foods aisle, and while your kids moan about the temperature and urge you like a sled dog to “mush! mush!”, you gleefully take a screen shot of an online dictionary entry for the word “ensorcelled”.

And your wife is at work, and she’s probably saving the life of some baby right now, but you forward the picture to her anyway, and invite her apology.

And though she acknowledges her error, her grudging apology is not really an apology at all, but almost a provocation, indicating that she is “just a little bit sorry.” And if this were anyone else, you might be exasperated by this response, or perhaps even angry. But there is black magic at work here. And like quicksand, the more you struggle to resist, the more you feel yourself ensorcelled.