We’re the ugly couple that just moved in down the hall, John and Ellen Pratt. You said hello to us in the hallway last Sunday and then again this Wednesday. You’re a very handsome couple.

This is an awkward approach, we realize, but we’d like to be friends with you. We had intended to wait until you approached us, but we know you’re busy people with hectic schedules—last Saturday we counted, and your car was in and out of its space seven times.

We’d like you to know that we’ve had successful relationships with other good looking couples, and we wouldn’t mind if we were on your b-list. We even realize you might not want to have a public relationship with us, and we understand that. We imagine that an evening of dinner and drinks and a rented movie would be wonderful. That’s an invitation for your next free Friday night. You tell us.

What we’d really like is to hear the story of how you first met. We’re good listeners. We have big ears, and we feel certain that your story will be interesting.

Our story is interesting, we think. We met at a sleep research seminar. We were guinea pigs. Our cots were next-door. We were hooked up to a network of computers that recorded our brain activity while we slept. We were both in graduate school at the time, and we did it for the money.

After the second night, an attendant discovered that our data was a perfect match. The print-outs that tracked our sleep and dream patterns could be laid one on top of the other and be seen as one line.

We became the focus of the study. We were a bona fide phenomenon, and night after night our sleep/dream data were exactly the same, identical. Though they weren’t sure what their findings meant, they were becoming very excited about us—just as we were becoming very excited about each other. They asked us if we would consider sleeping in the same bed one night, just to see how our brain activity would be affected. We were shy about it, but we consented.

That first night we spent in the same bed together a sleep communication was discovered. We spoke to one another in a very formal, courtly manner, characterized by a comically exaggerated politeness. Without fail, we used direct address each time we spoke to one another. It was really very funny. While listening to the audio tape of that night, we fell in love.

We excused ourselves from the experiment in order to pursue the research on our own, and we have not slept apart since. Our marriage is our research. Which is what we’ve been doing, off and on, for the past nine years. We’re book editors, and we’ve been working on a book about couples who have communication abilities that go beyond what is considered to be the norm. We’ve conducted more than five thousand interviews with couples around the world who have experienced many different types of hyper-communication abilities. Our research is anecdotal, not scientific. But we have what we feel are very definitive findings.

We have discovered that nearly all of the responding couples also have a shared negative characteristic that, in almost every case, defines their relationship to the rest of the world.

We’ve documented alcoholic couples. Mentally challenged couples. AIDS couples. Interracial couples. Obese couples. Couples who have been unable to consumate their relationship. Dwarf couples. Insomniac couples. Wheelchair couples. Toothless couples. A deaf couple whose signing has multiplied the manual alphabet tenfold. Epistolary couples. Infertile couples. Cancer couples. Aphasiac couples. Illiterate couples. Alzheimer couples. Heroin couples. Prison couples. Webbed-footed couples. Suicide couples. Homeless couples. Blind couples. UFO couples. Acne couples. Hypochondriac couples. And a good number ugly couples, like us.

We have a very strong feeling that you might be such a couple—hyper-communicative. We apologize if it bothers you that we believe your successful relationship might be centered on a shared negative characteristic. We are curious about you as a couple. We want to know how such a handsome man and woman communicate. We can’t imagine that either of you have a single negative characteristic, let alone share one. But maybe…

This is a serious inquiry.