Like most NYC commuters, I spend a lot of time staring at the advertisements in the subway on my ride into work. One particular ad recently caught my eye: a photo of couple in bed together, the woman smiling at her snoring husband. The top of the ad reads: "He may not always be charming. But he's always your prince." With no photo of a product or a mention of a service at the bottom, I was curious about what the ad was offering, so I investigated it. Turns out, I wasn't the only one whose interest was peaked. The Huffington Post's Martha Temlock recently posted on the ad, pointing out that it "was paid for by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (via the National Healthy Resource Center) to encourage couples to work on their relationship" and it appears on mass transit systems in New York, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington, D.C. The website itself, the TwoOfUs.org, dispenses tips and advice on meeting the challenges of dating, engagements, family and married life.Now if getting relationship advice from the US government makes you a bit uneasy, you're not alone. Temlock points out in her post that there are financial motivations for government officials to promote marriage: after all, as anyone who's done it knows, divorce can be an expensive undertaking. And of course, considering the tough, sometimes unfair economic choices being made in our recessive economy, promoting less spending on assistance programs is one way to cut the fat. I do agree with Temlock, though, that subway ads might not be the most wonderful use of money, either. That being said, the website offers a space to have a multitude of discussions on what's difficult (as well as what's fabulous) about relationships. In my mind, we can't have enough of those conversations. Modern relationships of any kind are not easy and require a lot of thoughtful negotiation and open communication. At the very least, I applaud TwoOfUs.org for bringing that sort of talk to the table, though I would also add that I wouldn't mind seeing more forms of partnership represented on the site, such as non-monogamous partners or gay unions. After all, breaking up is hard to do...for all of us.