STRANGER THAN FICTION: IS THERE REALLY A MR. RIGHT OR JUST A MR. HE'LL DO?

I never thought Goldust and Luna would have more appeal than me.

We're rounding the bend to our fourth anniversary -- April 28.

The marriage started with The Other Half jokingly singing "D-I-V-O-R-C-E" while our post-nuptial photographs were being taken. The performance was captured on video by my mother-in-law, who zoomed in on me in time to catch my post-song nagging. Even though I'm speaking through clenched teeth, you can pretty much read my lips saying, "I can-NOT believe you are doing this. Stop it."

And so it goes, year after year, Mr. Half doing stuff I think is inappropriate and me nagging him about it.

"Stop nagging me," he often says. Nothing gets a woman like the word "nag."

"Stop being an imbecile, then," I often reply. Nothing gets a man like questioning his intelligence -- especially if he understands what the word "imbecile" means.

I read the anniversaries in the paper every Sunday and want to call the women who have been married 25 or 50 years. Some of them actually are smiling in their pictures, and their husbands look pretty happy, too.

"What the heck did you two do to stay together that long?" I'd ask.

"I drank two martinis at dinner every night," they'd probably say. Or maybe, "I started growing my own marijuana in my flower bed." Or, "He was out of town on business three weeks out of the month."

No matter how bizarre and hard-to-understand men make us out to be, most of us are strong women with a lot of depth to our personalities. We might appreciate a nice looking young man as he walks by, but we don't yell, "SHAKE IT, DON'T BREAK IT, BABY!" We generally don't place unsightly hairs on soda cans or invite our interns into back rooms for a little Democratic interaction.

And let's face it, girls. After a few years of marriage, Ellen and Anne start to make a LOT more sense.

Don't get me wrong. I love my husband. But I'm not sure when this stage of regularly wanting to smack him is going to pass. And don't, repeat, DON'T blame all of this on that universal scapegoat, PMS. This feeling can hit any time of the month.

The problem is that many women, including me, get to a certain age and meet a certain man, and marriage seems like the right thing to do. Especially if those women are pregnant. (Just kidding, Grammy!) Sure, you notice a few things about him that probably aren't going to be ideal. Even though you're smart enough to know you can't change people, you think, "I can live with that."

And you ignore advice from your friends, like I did when Brad M. told me: "You know the stuff your boyfriend does that kind of JUST BARELY gets on your nerves? Multiply that feeling by 100 and you've got marriage."

So here I am, four years later, sitting here baring my soul while my husband watches professional wrestling. It's showing on two channels, so he never has to see a commercial.

"Luna just WENT OFF on Sable," he just said. "Cat fight! Yeow! Yeow! Fffftt! Fffftt!"

But then I look at my closest friends. One just dumped her boyfriend of six years because she's no spring chicken and he never wants to get married again. Another just got dumped by her boyfriend -- he said he originally felt HE was the problem in their relationship, but he figured out later that it was really HER. And another is actually taking a job in another state to avoid the months of stalking and threatening phone calls that would no doubt follow a real breakup with his nutty girlfriend.

"We'll try it long-distance," he told her. Yeah, right.

Maybe I should take Mr. Half a soda and a bag of popcorn and fluff up his pillows. I guess there are worse things than having to watch professional wrestling.

And if things get really bad, I can always get those Dr. John Gray tapes.

~Heidi Nieland is a former Southeast Missourian staff member who lives in Pensacola, Fla.