The 7 Most Insane Things Done in the Name of Love
If you've ever fallen hard for a special someone, you know that love can be as dangerous a drug as heroin or vodka tampons. One minute you're completely sane, the next you're jumping on Oprah's couch like a coked-up toddler who just found out about Pop Rocks. But no matter how much you love your significant other, you've probably never crossed the line from crazy romantic to crazy insane.
We can't say the same thing about these guys.
Russian Man Stages His Elaborate Death for a Marriage Proposal
Imagine you're meeting your boyfriend at a diner or vodka bar. Instead of finding your lover staring adoringly at you over candlelight, there's a first rate trauma scene unfolding in the parking lot: ambulances, wrecked cars ... and your boyfriend lifeless and bloody on the ground. The paramedic gives you the worst news of all -- the love of your life is dead. Your dreams are as torn as the very visible flesh on his tender neck.
"We could have saved him. But look at those suspenders -- he's better off dead."
You turn your back to the horror movie that's now your life to process everything that's happening. And as you do, your goddamned boyfriend pops up, skips over to the ambulance and emerges with a balloon in his hand. A FREAKING BALLOON. This whole scene was Freddy Kruegerski's idea of a marriage proposal. And since you're obviously suffering from PTSD, you say yes.
When Alexey Bykov proposed to his girlfriend in the completely true scenario above, he knew it had to be convincing. So he hired a movie director, stuntmen, make-up artists and even a scriptwriter to stage the whole thing. "I wanted her to realize how empty her life would be without me and how life would have no meaning without me," he said, dickishly.
"Also, we're now ridiculously in debt. Aaron Sorkin and Ridley Scott do not come cheap."
Husband and Wife Get Surgery to Look Like Each Other
We've all known a couple that's so in love that they finish each other's sentences or take on each other's mannerisms. Some lovey-dovey couples are so in sync that they even start physically looking alike after a while. But when husband and wife Neil and Jacqueline Megson started the look-alike phase of their courtship, it was more than just a case of buying a couple of wacky matching sweaters. They went for a more permanent change -- through the magic of plastic surgery.
We're pretty sure this is the sort of thing Hippocrates had in mind.
Before continuing, we should clarify something about Neil and Jacqueline. Neil was a performance artist and Jacqueline was a nurse turned performance artist collaborator. So it's not like we're talking about a pair of married homebodies who hosted Pampered Chef parties on the weekend (or maybe they did, but like really weird ones that mixed adult diapers with cooking).
Anyway, Neil and Jacqueline loved each other so much that they felt as if they were the same person. So why not physically alter their appearances to look like they were twins who went by one name -- Genesis Breyer P-Orridge? This involved getting matching boob jobs, and after that, it was eye and nose jobs, then cheek and chin implants, followed by lip plumping and liposuction. There was even a tattooed beauty mark thrown in there, though whose was natural and whose was a tat is probably irrelevant at this point. All told, the pair received more than $200,000 worth of plastic surgery, all for this:
No word on who had which genitals. If any.
Now here's where it gets weird ... er. Mrs. Pandrogeny died of cancer in 2007. Mr. Pandrogeny kept going with the surgeries and continues to call himself "we" until this day. And you thought you were in love.
Man Has Friend Shoot Him so Girlfriend Will Sympathize
Being a kid in love is one thing. Being a kid in love and possessing the brain of a hamster is lethal. Especially for 20-year-old Jordan Cardella, who begged his buddy to shoot him (with a gun!) so his ex-girlfriend would feel sorry for him. In Jordan's sad little head, he figured that if he got shot, his girlfriend would go all Florence Nightingale on his bullet-riddled body and feel so sorry for him that she'd take him back. He probably got the idea from a soap opera or JFK.
So Jordan enlisted the help of Michael Wezyk, who simultaneously wins the awards for Best and Stupidest Friend of All Time by agreeing to shoot Jordan like he asked. Why didn't Jordan just do the deed himself? Because he was a convicted felon, and handling a firearm with his history of law troubles would be dumb.
And that was the last time Jordan and logic were ever on speaking terms.
The two picked out a nice, serene spot in a park where they could quietly proceed with getting freaking shot for love. Now get this: Jordan asked Michael to shoot him not once, not twice, but three goddamn times in order to get his girlfriend back. Michael agreed, aimed his weapon and shot Jordan in the arm. Jordan predictably fell to the ground, clutching his bleeding appendage. However, when Jordan demanded that Michael shoot him two more times, Michael came down with a sudden case of holy-balls-what-am-I-doing and refused. Michael put the gun away and instead took Jordan to the hospital.
Hey, this is the part of the story where Jordan's pain and suffering pay off with some sweet girlfriend loving, right? Wrong. Jordan's ex decided to stay the shit away from all that noise, and never even visited him in the hospital. But you know who did visit Jordan? The fuzz. Turns out the cops don't take kindly to people getting shot, even if it's for romance.
"Why didn't you just hold a boombox over your head like a normal creep?"
Loving Husbands Spell Out Their Love With Tons of Shit
Some women complain that their husbands only give shitty presents. Farmer Dick Kleis is the embodiment of that sentiment. On one special occasion, he actually gave his wife, Carole, tons and tons of shit.
Dick had a manure spreader just lying around, doing nothing in particular, and he decided to put it to use. For love! Dick gathered up 123,000 pounds of manure, presumably after feeding his cows nothing but Taco Bell for a week, and got to work. After three hours of carefully spreading the manure all over his field, he spelled out a birthday message to his dear wife: "HAP BDAY LUV U." In shit.
"Of course it's abbreviated. What am I, made of cow shit?"
How did Carole react to this scatological show of affection? She loved it.
And Dick isn't the only man who's expressed his love in excrement. One Valentine's Day, Bruce Andersland busted out the ol' manure spreader, aka the Love Machine, loaded her up with a few tons of dung and drew a gigantic heart with an arrow through it on his field.
"This is great and all, but how are you going to fertilize the crops come spring?"
When Bruce's day-long project was done, he had a heart that was a half-mile wide and could seriously confuse a visiting alien species into thinking that we show our love by making one another heave. And yeah, Bruce's wife, Beth, was impressed with her little Poop Cupid. She called the gift "cute" and said, "Why not do something fun with what you got?"
Truer words were never spoken. Oh, and for any would-be Feces Casanovas out there, Dick Kleis has some truly useful advice on what kind of manure to use: "Any manure will work but the good, soft, gushy, warm stuff works the best. It kind of melts the snow." Yes, if you want to woo that special someone, only the gooiest diarrhea will do.
Man Fakes a Hate Crime to Save His Marriage
You know how sometimes your wife serves you with divorce papers and your first impulse is to get her back by staging a horrific hate crime that will scare the shit out of her? LB Williams is right there with you. To keep his marriage together, he set a cross on fire smack dab in the middle of his own lawn, complete with a note from the KKK warning his future ex-wife that she "better not leave that .")
Confused? We probably should have mentioned that LB is black and his wife, Donna, is white.
Oh, wait. That actually just makes it more confusing.
Though to be fair, the first part of LB's plan worked like a hate crime charm. Donna was understandably shocked and scared that the KKK had done such a horrifying thing to them. Until she realized that the Ku Klux Klan is not known for violently supporting interracial marriages. What's more, when police began to investigate the supposed crime, they noticed that the cross had been meticulously placed on the lawn in such a spot so as to not burn up the driveway or otherwise damage the house. Since when was the KKK this considerate?
"We've really been working on improving our public image."
The cops got around to questioning LB, who quickly fessed up to the shenanigans, saying they were the desperate acts of a desperate man. A desperate man who used an emotionally charged symbol of hate and terror to woo his wife.
Hit Man Falls in Love With His Target, Fakes Her Death
So your husband is having an affair. You have a few options: You could A) get a divorce B) ignore the affair and take a lover, because you've always wanted to take a lover or C) murder the shit out of someone. For the truly insane, C is the only answer. Which was what jilted wife Maria Nilza Simoes decided to do when she discovered that her husband was boinking someone on the side.
"If I divorce him, I only get half his stuff."
Not knowing any first rate assassins, Maria hired an unemployed ex-con to kill her husband's girlfriend. For all we know, she found him on Craigslist under the "Dumb as Balls" section. After all, it's not like you can just order up a murderer out of the L.L. Bean catalog. She did the best she could. Which is important to remember when you find out what bullshittery happened next.
The unfortunately named hit man, Carlos Roberto de Jesus, finds Lupita, the lover, and discovers that she's his childhood friend. He can't murder the girl he once raced down gentle rolling hills in slow motion with, so Carlos does the next best thing: He convinces her to douse herself in ketchup and pose like she was straight up murdered. And she does!
"I appreciate your dedication to realism, but soiling yourself was really unnecessary."
No one told her that the knife-under-the-arm trick only works in profile. No one told Mrs. Cheated On either, because the picture totally convinced her that the mistress was dead. Maybe she thought the knife in the armpit was the remains of a "Just Murdered" sign conveniently used to label corpses.
In either case, Carlos claimed his money and Maria went back to her life of not getting enough affection from her husband. Until a few days later, when Maria saw her hired assassin "canoodling" with the dead woman in the marketplace.
"I said get rid of the body, not Weekend at Bernie's it!"
With her pride taking a hit and obviously not thinking this through, she reported them both to the police for fraud. You don't need a law degree to see the flaw in her logic here. While indeed the couple was being investigated for fraud and extortion, Maria is now being charged with issuing death threats. Because duh.
It's not all bad, though. While facing the embarrassment of being labeled "ketchup woman," Lupita the lover is being championed for a possible seat in the local town hall. If there's one thing people in her town value, it's a woman who will play a corpse covered in ketchup.
Man and Wife Live Like Cavemen, for Love
Fifty years ago, Liu Guojiang was a 19-year-old Chinese kid who fell in love. But to the dismay of his family and the delight of local gossips, the object of Liu's affections was Xu Zhaoqing, a widowed woman who was 10 years older than he was. In other words, a cougar. Back in those days, there was only one thing to do when you fell in love with a cougar: suicide by wrestling an actual cougar imported from the Americas. Liu and Xu decided to run away to a cave on the side of a mountain instead. And they lived there for 50 years.
You're probably thinking, "Eh ... so they lived in a cave. So did my ancestors. How bad could it be?" Deliberately leaving behind plumbing, electricity and, for the most part, food to be with the one you love is pretty dramatic. In the beginning, Xu and Liu had nothing but roots, grasses and sex juice to sustain them.
Mostly sex juice.
Liu even managed to bring some crude versions of big city amenities to the couple's new home. Like stairs. In order to help his wife get around the mountain, Liu hand-carved 6,000 steps into the side of the mountain, with nothing more than a chisel and his devotion to his wife to chip them. Now don't you feel stupid for breaking up with your girlfriend over who was the best Doctor in Doctor Who?
"I will knock you down these stairs if you say 'The Sixth Doctor' one more time!"
You can visit Eddie's website here. Jamie Flexman likes to blog about how to quit your job and other ramblings. You can also see his fingers of fun here.
