You have been together for two years. You have met his parents, survived a vacation, possibly weathered a fight or two about dishes. And yet, every time the pressure builds — literally — you excuse yourself, clench heroically, or simply suffer in silence while maintaining the serene facial expression of a Renaissance painting.
You are not broken. You are not immature. You are experiencing one of the most quietly universal relationship anxieties that nobody ever puts on a greeting card.
Let’s talk about it. All of it.
The Double Standard Is Real (And Also Kind of Funny Ha Ha?)
Here is the situation millions of women find themselves in: he rips one on the couch and laughs about it. You sit there laughing along while quietly dying inside because you’ve been holding one in since Tuesday.
There is a name for this, though it has no clinical diagnosis: the Fart Double Standard. Men, socialized from boyhood to treat flatulence as a comedic achievement, tend to have zero hesitation. Women, conditioned from birth to present themselves as creatures of unimpeachable grace, have learned to treat intestinal gas like a state secret.
The cruel irony is that the longer you maintain the ruse, the harder it becomes to break it. Two weeks becomes two months becomes two years, and suddenly you’re trapped. You haven’t farted in front of him once, which means the first time will feel, in your nervous system, roughly equivalent to a congressional hearing.
And if you’ve been living in this dynamic long enough, you know the spiral: well, I just can’t fart now, out of nowhere. There’d need to be a whole transition period. A conversation, maybe. Some kind of warning system. This is not a healthy place to be.
Holding Farts In Is Objectively Bad
Let’s set aside the relationship psychology for a moment and get into the cold, hard, medically inconvenient reality: your body produces gas constantly, and it would very much like to leave.
The average human produces somewhere between half a litre and a litre and a half of intestinal gas every single day — a fact established by actual researchers who, in 1998, spent four hours measuring this in willing subjects using rectal tubes. Science has never been more committed to anything. What those scientists found is that the average fart volume is about 100ml, released three to nine times per day. That’s on a normal day. Add a burrito, a glass of wine, some broccoli, basically any food that makes life worth living, and the numbers climb.
When you hold all of that in, a few things happen, none of them good.
First, the pressure builds. Your abdominal muscles take on an increasing load that was never designed to be a long-term project. The discomfort escalates from mild to significant to the kind of cramping that makes you cancel plans and lie on the floor.
Second — and this is the part that should give you pause — the gas doesn’t just disappear. It gets reabsorbed into your bloodstream. It travels to your lungs. It exits through your breath. You are, in the most technical sense possible, breathing out farts. You held in a fart so he wouldn’t hear it, and it came out of your mouth twenty minutes later while you were telling him about your day. This is not a metaphor. This is gastroenterology.
Third, gastroenterologist Dr. Niket Sonpal of Touro College of Medicine has noted that a chronic habit of holding in gas may increase the risk of diverticulitis — a condition where pouches form in the lining of the colon and become infected. This is a real, painful, medical situation. You are risking diverticulitis for a man who has absolutely farted in his sleep next to you.
To be fair: the science is somewhat murky here. Other doctors point out that occasional holding-in poses no serious risk. But the consensus is clear — when you can, you should. The body is not designed for long-term storage.
It is also worth noting that the viral story about the man who died from holding in a fart on a first meeting with his girlfriend’s mother is, unfortunately, fake. But the spirit of it — that prolonged suppression is at minimum deeply unpleasant and at maximum a genuine health liability — is very much real.
Let the gas go. Do it for your colon.
50/50 It Won’t Even Stink
Here is something the fear-of-farting conversation never addresses, and it should, because it completely changes the risk calculus:
Most farts don’t smell.
This is not wishful thinking. This is chemistry. The gases that make up the vast majority of human flatulence — nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, carbon dioxide, methane — are completely odorless. They are, in fact, the same gases in the air you’re already breathing. Researchers at Cary Gastroenterology Associates have estimated that only about 1% of passed gas has an odor that the average human would find unpleasant.
One percent.
The villain, when there is one, is a compound called hydrogen sulfide — the same gas responsible for the smell of rotten eggs, produced when gut bacteria break down sulfur-containing proteins. Not every meal creates hydrogen sulfide. Not every gut produces it in quantity. And not every fart contains it at all.
What this means, practically speaking, is that roughly half the time you let one out, there is nothing to detect. It will be a sound event only, and sound events are manageable. Sound events can be strategized around (more on this shortly). Sound events fade. A scent event, by contrast, is a slow-rolling crime scene that lingers and announces itself. These are two very different problems.
This is also why some people earn what is, in certain social circles, a genuinely coveted reputation: the loud farter with no smell. This person is almost universally beloved. They are unafraid. They produce a sound like a trombone. They look you dead in the eye. You wait for the olfactory consequences. They never come. You find yourself, inexplicably, respecting this person more than you did before.
You can be this person. Here’s how.
The key is dietary awareness. Sulfur-heavy foods — broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, kale, red meat in large quantities — are your enemies on date nights. They load your gut with the raw materials for hydrogen sulfide production. Leave them for nights alone. On romantic evenings, lean toward foods that produce volume without stench: carbohydrates, beans (yes, beans — they produce hydrogen and carbon dioxide, which are odorless), lightly seasoned proteins. You will be loud. You will be fearless. You will smell like nothing at all.
The legend builds itself.
Embrace the Truth: You Need to Fart and You Know It
There is a version of this article that gently suggests you might want to consider becoming more comfortable with bodily functions. This is not that version.
You need to fart. You know you need to fart. There is no universe in which this is not happening, and the sooner you accept that the number is not going to be zero, the better decisions you will make.
The average person, under normal circumstances, passes gas 14 to 23 times per day. That is not a typo. That is not an outlier figure from a particularly gassy study population. That is the baseline. You are, on an average day, a gas-producing organism 14 to 23 times over.
Now consider: you are with your boyfriend for, conservatively, 30% of your waking hours. That means, on a normal day, somewhere between 4 and 7 fart-events are occurring in his vicinity. These do not disappear simply because you have decided they aren’t happening. They are being suppressed, reabsorbed, redirected, and occasionally — inevitably — escaping in ways you cannot control.
The math is not on your side. You cannot fart zero times in front of another adult while occupying the same physical space for two years. You can only choose between controlled release and uncontrolled release. And anyone who has experienced the latter — a nervous laugh that went sideways, an unexpected sneeze, a moment of particularly sincere relaxation — knows that uncontrolled release is categorically worse.
What you are attempting is, statistically speaking, impossible. The only question is whether you decide the terms.
Blaming Pets and Covering It Up
Okay. So you’re not ready for a full philosophical reckoning with your flatulence. That’s fine. There are intermediate strategies.
The first and most time-honored is the pet attribution. If you have a dog, a cat, or any medium-to-large mammal in the household, congratulations: you have a decoy. Animals fart constantly and without shame, which means that any unexplained odor in the home can be attributed to them with complete plausible deniability. The trick is not to immediately say “oh, that must be the dog” — that’s too fast, too practiced, too guilty. You wait. You let the smell arrive. You let it settle into the room. Then, casually, you glance toward the animal and shake your head with mild affection. No words necessary. The dog has taken the fall. The dog does not care.
For sound coverage, the world offers many tools. The chair slam is a classic: a single sharp push back from the dining table covers a remarkable range of frequencies. The cabinet door works similarly, particularly in kitchens, where the acoustics are hard and the ambient noise is high. The pot bang, correctly deployed — a lid dropped onto a pot with natural-seeming clumsiness — is louder and thus suitable for more ambitious occasions. The coughing maneuver requires practice and a certain commitment to the bit, but has the advantage of being entirely body-based, requiring no props.
The highest art form, however, is timing. If you get genuinely good at timing, none of the above is necessary. The goal is to synchronize release with ambient noise: the dog barking, the television reaching a loud moment, a truck passing outside, the refrigerator compressor cycling on. These windows are brief — two seconds, maybe three — and they require a kind of attentive readiness that borders on meditation. You are listening to the house. You are one with the house. You are waiting for the house to give you permission.
Some people spend years developing this skill. It is, in its own strange way, a form of mastery.
The question you eventually have to ask yourself, though, is whether a life of constant vigilance is actually preferable to one honest moment. The decoy game is high-maintenance. The timing game is exhausting. And you will, eventually, be caught — not because you’re careless, but because two years of faultless execution is simply beyond what any human nervous system can sustain at all times.
But until then: listen for the dog.
Maybe Sound Isn’t the Issue. You Just Stink.
It’s time to have a harder conversation.
Many people operating under the assumption that farts are uniformly embarrassing are missing a crucial distinction: there are two completely different problems here, and they require completely different solutions.
Problem A: The fart is audible. It makes a sound. It announces itself with confidence. Everyone in the room knows what happened.
Problem B: The fart is silent. It makes no sound whatsoever. It simply… arrives. Like a fog. Like a verdict.
These are not equally bad. Problem A is embarrassing for approximately four to eight seconds, after which everyone laughs and moves on with their lives. Problem B is an ongoing crime that lingers in the air for minutes, that one person in the room is the only possible source of, and that cannot be laughed off because nobody can quite bring themselves to say anything.
The silent-but-deadly fart is not the safe option. It is, in fact, the worst option. You held it in, muffled the sound, felt proud of yourself — and then the hydrogen sulfide rolled out slowly, at body temperature, in a quiet room where he is sitting right next to you, and now you are both pretending nothing is happening and you will think about this moment for years.
Loud and odorless, by contrast, is practically a superpower. A loud fart with no smell is a punchline. It is a shared comedic moment. It is something you can reference later with genuine affection. It asks nothing of anyone except a brief acknowledgment that a sound occurred, and then it is over.
So if you have been holding things in because you’re worried about sound: reconsider. Sound is the least of it. Sound is fine. Sound you can survive.
What you should actually be thinking about is diet, because the difference between a silent stinker and a harmless thunderclap is almost entirely dietary. Stay away from the sulfur. Embrace the volume. This is a game you can actually win.
Prove You Really Love Me: The Fart Test
Here is a theory, advanced without apology:
The fart test is real, and more relationships should use it.
Not as a deliberate exercise. Not as something you schedule. But as a kind of informal diagnostic tool for where a relationship actually stands — how comfortable two people truly are with each other, and how the other person handles the sudden, unglamorous reality of sharing a body with a digestive system.
Think about it this way: you can learn a lot about a person’s character from how they respond to an accidental fart. Do they make you feel immediately at ease? Do they laugh in the kind, conspiratorial way that says we’re in this together? Or do they flinch, go quiet, treat the moment as a small but meaningful recalibration of how they see you?
The first response is the one you want. The second one is information.
A relationship that cannot survive the knowledge that both people in it have functional digestive systems is not a relationship built on reality. It is built on a shared agreement to pretend, and shared agreements to pretend are exhausting to maintain and tend to crack under pressure — the pressure, specifically, of moving in together, of being sick in front of each other, of the thousand unglamorous moments that constitute an actual shared life.
If he loves you, he will handle this. He will probably laugh. He may even be relieved, because he has been waiting for you to be a real person in front of him and not a museum exhibit of yourself.
And if he somehow doesn’t handle it — if this is genuinely the thing that shifts how he sees you — then you have passed a different kind of test. You have learned that he was never going to be able to handle the full version of you, and you found out for the low, low price of one moment of intestinal honesty.
The fart test costs nothing. It tells you everything.
Take the test.
A Few Practical Approaches, Ranked by Courage Required
The Retaliatory Fart. He does it; you do it back. This is elegant in its simplicity. It reframes the whole thing as a mutual exchange rather than a unilateral declaration. Low risk, surprisingly effective.
The Accidental on Purpose. You engineer a situation — a long couch session, a burrito night, a particularly cozy morning in bed — and let nature take its course. Plausible deniability. A classic. No one can prove intent.
The Dog Takes the Fall. See above. Works indefinitely, or until the dog moves out.
The Direct Announcement. Some people, apparently, simply say: “I need to warn you, I’m about to fart.” This requires a level of self-possession that borders on enlightenment, but those who have tried it report it works, and often produces the exact laugh that makes the whole thing immediately fine.
The Sleep Ambush. Do nothing. Wait. Your body will handle it autonomously. You’ll wake up to find the relationship completely intact and the secret finally, mercifully out.
The Real Question
You consider yourself a feminist. You know that women fart. You know it’s not wrong. And yet here you are.
The hesitation isn’t ideological. It’s emotional. It’s the very human fear of being seen as ordinary by someone whose opinion of you matters enormously — of sliding from the person he fell for into the person he merely lives with.
But here is what the data, the science, the gastroenterologists, and the collective wisdom of everyone who has survived this moment have to say: the person who loves you already sees you as a full human being. He is waiting, possibly without knowing it, for you to believe that too.
The fart is just the messenger.
Send it.
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