You’ve forgiven an affair. You’ve put up with violations of the marriage’s budget. You’ve been bored, irked, and ignored.

But if he mentions picking up a goddamned wet towel off the floor one more time, you’re out of there.

That’s the gist of recent research about the real “marriage killer,” which is summarized in an interesting Wall Street Journal piece.

It’s nagging. Researchers have found that unhappy couples nag much more than the happy ones, and that this nagging can constitute as grave if not a graver "death by a thousand cuts" threat to a marriage than the more cataclysmic eruptions of adultery or financial collapse.

The research looks at ways to break the nagging conversational habit. That seems like a useful enough strategy.

And, heaven forbid that life, or marriage, should present us with a problem that can’t be solved with 10 bulletized advice tips that can fit in a mauve-colored sidebar in a women’s magazine, one of which is invariably some version of “take a deep breath and calm down” and another is invariably some version of “tell your partner what you’re feeling.”

The premise behind changing the nagging conversation, of course, is that the problem really is a snarky discursive style, rooted in insecurity or obsessiveness, for example. In other words, when it comes to the nag, a “cigar is just a cigar,” as Freud tells us.

I totally believe that in some cases, this is true. Nagging doesn’t connote anything more ominous than the nagging habit itself, and a sense of insecurity, perhaps, about getting what you want.

Having been around lots of nagging couples and spouses, though, I also feel that in other cases, the nag is more like a secret code, or language, that only the marriage entirely understands, or even hears. The nag broadcasts a message on a frequency that the spouses hear but not outsiders.

Most relationships of any duration have secret decoder ring elements: they have idiosyncratic ways that they talk about truths that are simply too hard or obdurate to unpack, so they handle them through safely-coded discourse. The nag takes a chisel to that big, hulking rock of a problem, rather than a pack of dynamite.

My hunch with some nagging couples is that the cigar isn’t just a cigar, at all. It’s a way of “saying” a discontent that goes deeper but that, once articulated openly, will effectively unravel the relationship. It must be "vented," this discontent, but it can’t be expressed head-on, because the consequences are just too grave.

In these cases, “don’t mix colors with whites in the laundry” is how we pronounce the deeper problem of, “I’ve lost that lovin’ feeling.”

Having some fun, here’s the nag, and here’s what the secret decoder ring tells us it really means: