About four months ago, as gas started to inch its way toward $4.00 a gallon, my wife and I decided to start looking into a new car. I drive 100+ miles a day to work and back (another story altogether) and I could sense that very soon $90 would be leaping out of my pocket every week just so that I could keep doing it. My current car is also an all-wheel drive, heavy Subaru. I love this car in every way except for its habit of drinking gas like your prom date drinks vodka and purple Kool-Aid.

Of course our first notion was the Toyota Prius. We took one home for a weekend and loved it, but thinking we could get a better deal if we haggled we returned it and said “not yet thanks” on Monday morning. Life got in the way, my job moved into a new office and my wife produced a play. Now that we’re looking again in earnest we can find nary a Prius under twenty-six grand. What used to be the sole domain of soy-sipping hipsters and tenured english Professors is now standard issue survival equipment, and surviving the summer can mean only one thing: real, no screwing around, car shopping.

This is one of many times since hitting my latter twenties that I’ve opened myself up to being marketed to in not so subtle ways. Perusing the web for cars that seem like good matches for us I’m bombarded with images that threaten to shake my beliefs about what I am: in nearly every shot of the Honda Fit in action a slender hipster is casually recumbent in the backseat, swilling a lookalike Starbuck’s latte and surfing on his MacBook. Similarly, the Kia Spectra5 seems to have been placed into production entirely to transport indie-rock bands to their well-attended gigs in Brooklyn. Even the Nissan Versa, sensible in almost every other aspect, assaults the viewer with Juno-style quips while images of its interior load. Room for big hair, indeed. After a while the cynicism sets in so deep that you even start to feel like your friends and Consumer Reports are lying to you about which car to buy. Later, the prospect of buying any car seems like madness and the concept of what constitutes “good” gas mileage becomes contorted and twisted, until all you want is some theoretical car that runs on moonbeams and good thoughts.

The first time I ever shopped for a car on my own, I test-drove a Plymouth so old it had lived through the first oil crisis. The marketing materials that accompanied that one were a newspaper ad and an address I thought I could find without too much trouble. I became aware three blocks in that the brakes were shot, and the shift linkage was gone. I drove a harrowing four miles down a rural interstate before turning around and making a deal right there on the spot. I was absolutely smitten to have found a car that was about as snotty and recalcitrant as I was at 20. Soon it had the requisite Apple sticker and a rebuilt transmission, and my future wife would even ride in it—but just once, enough times to convince her that it hated her and that the feeling was mutual.

But this time I’ve pledged to be more sagacious, resolute even, in our quest to get a car that fits all of our varied needs. We’ve created a composite of this car and it has three hundred airbags, 800 horsepower, a built-in Mac, talking nav that knows where to get really good Pho, and theoretical tie downs for the theoretical car seats our theoretical children may one day ride in. Oh, and alloy wheels. And an EPA estimated 85 miles to the gallon.

What I’m getting at is that I’m bad at this, and all the marketing doesn’t really help as much as I thought it might when I was younger. At 12, staring at the pictures in car magazines like most boys do at that age, I was convinced that car buying was not only easy but probably fun, too. The wise, current-day version of me knows what it’s like to have to tell a car salesman that I do not always, in fact, “wear the pants” in this marriage. The pants are shared, thank you very much, and I try to make it so that my turn happens when my wallet is missing so that we don’t end up with more Plymouths.