Reporters who marry other reporters often meet in morbid ways. I know one couple who met over a dead body. Still happy together, as the Turtles sing, living in the country with their two young sons. As for me, the man who would, more than a decade later, become my second husband first spoke to me at length because we had a difference of opinion about domestic violence.

The story was this: A man, estranged from wife and children, asked if he could take them shopping for school supplies. She consented and went along for the trip. He rigged his van with explosives and blew them all sky-high. The article, as co-written by my future husband and a still-good friend, was sensitive and complete.

The pull-quote? Not so much. “He just loved her so much,” one of the killer’s relatives told the Baltimore Sun. It pissed me off. I vented to colleagues. Word got out and my phone rang. It was my future husband, in defense of the copy desk, a position my future husband was not known to take very often.

He argued in favor of the sentiment as true and therefore worthy of being highlighted. He said love could be dark, violent, perverted, twisted, horrible, destructive — and still be love. I disagreed. I’m not sure I had the presence of mind to quote Shakespeare — love is not love which seeks to alter — but has anyone tried to alter a lover more than the person who kills that lover?

We agreed to disagree. Which means, of course, that I decided to overlook the fact that he was wrong on this topic. Dead wrong. Rim shot, I’m here all week!

For years, I’ve been making the same joke. If a person is hellbent on murder-suicide with a partner, current or former, just do the suicide part first, OK? Problem solved. If you’re really fated to meet up in heaven, I’m sure it will all work out.

Please note the gender-neutral language above. Lover, person, partner. I am being polite. More often than not, men do this. I know, I know. People will find examples that women do it, too. Yay, equality. Statistics on what is now known as intimate partner violence are easy to find but hard to parse. After spending hours with the Uniform Crime Report and the Centers for Disease Control data, I found this one nonprofit in Massachusetts, which seemed to offer the most comprehensive overview, with a decade’s worth of numbers and these observations: “[T]he vast majority of victims are women; nearly all the killers of both men and women were men; most male domestic violence homicide victims were killed by men because they were friends, family members or new partners of the domestic violence victims.”

Lately, the term “a woman scorned” has been making the rounds. YOU KNOW WHY, DON’T MAKE ME SAY IT. It is also attributed to Shakespeare by some, but that is incorrect. The author is Congreve and the full, correct quotation is: “Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.”

But does anyone believe that a woman scorned is more hellish than a man? In my reporting career, I covered a Texas case in which an estranged father poisoned his children during his weekend visitation, then dropped them off at his wife’s home while they were beginning their death throes. A few years ago, another estranged father brought his three children to a Baltimore hotel, where he drowned them, one by one.

Anecdotal, yes. But they were men and they felt scorned and you could argue that killing someone’s children and leaving that person to live with it is more hostile than taking out the entire family on a back-to-school-shopping trip. Sure, tell me about Medea! Remind me about Susan Smith. But then tell me how many real-life women have killed their children as an act of revenge against their partners. I honestly can’t find this information and I would like to have it.

Around the time that my one-day-husband and I got in our first argument — but not our last! — the Chicago Tribune made a bold choice to give page one coverage to every child who died by gun violence in Chicago. The rationale was simple: It was a tragedy because it wasn’t news. The cumulative weight of those articles would make that case in a way that individual obituaries never could.

For several years, I lobbied my bosses to consider writing about domestic violence this way. These were not “love stories gone wrong,” I said, but our coverage played into that narrative every time. If we committed to linking every domestic violence death, what might we learn about our culture at large?

The arguments I got back, to the extent that anyone bothered to argue with me, were:

1. Why would we write about domestic violence when the majority of homicides in Baltimore are young African-American men? (By the way, I’d be all for having everyone of those stories on page one, too. Baltimore, as of Feb. 11, has had 31 homicides and I think every one is page one news.)
2. Maryland has pretty progressive laws, so what’s the point if we can’t identify legislative changes that will make a difference?

I don’t know. I thought the point would be to look at every case of partner-against-partner homicide and find out what we don’t know, how our cultural biases are keeping us from preventing these crimes, whether they are man-on-woman, woman-on-man, man-on-man or woman-on-woman. But then, I also thought the company for which I worked could have taken stronger disciplinary measures against the co-worker discovered to be sharing his sexual fantasies about me via the newsroom computer system, so what do I know?

I hate the term domestic violence. When we use it, we make every case another love story gone wrong. To kill another person because that person no longer loves you is to seize power, to abuse, to punish. It is not love. Even if you finish yourself off afterwards, it is not love.

Meanwhile: Happy Valentine’s Day, honey. I love you even when you’re wrong. Which, of course, is hardly ever. Do you remember that one of our first dates was to a Congreve play? Or maybe it was Wycherley? At any rate, I remember I went home and sent an e-mail to a friend. Here it is, in its entirety: Restoration comedy. Why?