If the Onion have nailed this one, it could be the most important article they have, since it doesn’t involve just a major life decision, a major life fear, regret and a decision that involves a whole life (or at least a massive chunk of it) of living your life in a way you don’t honestly want to.
Why? Out of fear of being alone. Or of being old and/or too ugly to meet someone else. Or of dying alone.
So, it may have been better for the 82 percent of respondents who ‘felt a wave of relief upon hearing the sound of their spouse’s EKG flatline’, the 93 percent ‘who immediately enrolled in classes or booked trips they could have never taken with an ailing partner’, or the 42 percent who ‘admitted to dancing out of the hospital, buoyed by a newfound sense of optimism’ to break up 50 years earlier. Instead of spending those years waiting (looking forward to?) the sound of the EKG flatline or to dancing out the hospital