Thesis: Most men do not give a lot of thought to the comforter in the guest room. The male brain is perfectly capable of grasping the concept of a guest-room comforter, but it has no need to refer to it unless it A) is on fire, or B) is needed to extinguish a fire.

I know what a lot of guys are thinking right now: "I should go on Amazon and see if there are some good fire-suppression blankets, because that would be the right tool for the job, and I'll bet you can get one with a Vikings logo." So you go look for one and put it in your shopping cart, but you get distracted looking at generators and battery backups, and a week later you get a text from Amazon reminding you that your Vikings Fire Suppression Blanket has risen in price from $39.95 to $41.47, and you think, "How can the price go up when Kirk Cousins and Justin Jefferson are both out with injuries?"

Women, on the other hand, speaking broadly, have the exact condition of the guest room comforter in their heads at all times as part of a swirling galaxy of household items. If they note that it is slightly frayed, they do not do the sensible thing — turn it over, or angle it so it's not obvious, or tell themselves that they do not have to fix everything in the world today.

They commit themselves to a search for a new one, because Mother might drop in unexpectedly, possibly by parachute, and her eye is going right to the spot where the comforter is frayed.

"Are you two doing OK? Did he lose it all in Bitcoin?"

So my wife went to Costco for one of her bimonthly episodes of sensible accumulations, and bought one. The comforter — the name of which implies the existence of a bedcover called the Tormentor — was crepe. She asked what I thought, and I said I thought it looked like crepe.

"What? Well, if you don't like it, it can go back."

"No, it's fine. I just mispronounced the texture slightly, for no reason. It's great."

I took it out of the package and spread it out, only to discover that it had two sham pillowcases. These are pillowcases for pillows whose sole purpose is to sit on the bed until they are pushed aside, because they are useless.

And that is the other distinction between the sexes: Women, speaking broadly, will pile a bed with an assortment of pillows so numerous you wish you had a shovel to get them out in one stroke. "Time for bed — better start the pillow-relocation project if we want to get a good eight hours."

The very name of the sham pillowcase tells you it's a lie, a travesty of a mockery of a ruse of a pillow. I looked around to see if they fit anything, then remembered: We have no sham pillows. My wife is not a pillow-piler.

I silently added this to the long list of reasons I love her, the little things that never come up in conversation, but matter. You want to sit down young couples and talk about compatibility and tell them that different attitudes toward the sham don't really matter, but in another sense, they do. Ask the woman: "What if he agrees to sham pillows, but only if they have a Twins logo?"

If she pauses and thinks, then says, "New one, or classic?" Then you kids are good to go.