“I was twenty-two,” she said. “I didn’t know anything. I had spent my teenage years building my little advertising business. I thought it would be fun to hook up with a man who knew how to relax and had the means to do so. I didn’t count on losing respect for him.”

Hood laughed. “I had just the opposite problem,” he said. “My wife wasn’t happy with the way Op-Center monopolized my time. I actually quit for a few days, but I couldn’t stay away.”

“Did you know it was costing you your marriage?” Daphne asked.

“Not until the account was overdue,” Hood said. “I knew Sharon was unhappy, but I didn’t think she was that unhappy.”

“So she initiated it?”

Hood nodded.

“How do you get along now?” Daphne asked.

“Okay,” Hood said. “She’s flexible with visitation and all that. But we were never really best friends. I suppose that was a problem all along.”

“I agree,” Daphne said. “You have to like someone to be their friend. You don’t have to like them to be married to them. Actually, I’ve developed a simple test for that.”

“Have you?”

“Yes,” she said. “I call it the sandbox test. If you and your potential mate were dropped in a sandbox, could you have fun there for twenty-four hours? Could you build castles or have a little Zen garden or pretend you were on a beach? Could you improvise a game of Battleship or draw pictures? Could you do something other than have sex or wish you were somewhere else? If the answer is yes, then that’s a person you should consider being with.”

“Does it have to be a sandbox?” Hood asked. “Why not just a hotel room or some form of transportation?”

“You would have TV in a hotel room,” Daphne said. “Or magazines and food in an airplane or train. A sandbox demands imagination. You have to look at a mound of sand and see a dune or a mountain or a castle. It requires the ability to play well with others and to be a little silly. It requires the capacity to access the child inside you. Otherwise you can’t be in a sandbox at all. Or a fun relationship. You also need to be able to communicate. If you don’t have all of that, you’ll be incredibly bored. Or else you’ll end up bickering. Those same qualities are necessary for a successful relationship.”

“And how did you arrive at this concept?” Hood asked.

“When I was doing a national campaign for an insurance company,” the woman said. “It was set in a sandbox, with two people growing old together. It started me thinking.”