The generation of "studies" is one area of the American economy that continues to boom. Why, I'll bet America produces more studies in six months than those DVD-bootlegging Chinese produce in 10 years.

One of the latest in the mountain of studies produced by America's mighty study factories found that 30 percent of American teenagers who are online have swapped passwords with a boyfriend, girlfriend or friend.

Swapping passwords. Bumping data. Show me your access code, and I'll show you mine.

Let's hope those kids are wearing password protectors.

It's kind of sweet, really, a testimony to young love's belief that you must share every atom of your being with the loved one, that you can hold nothing back for yourself. And if you're only giving your password to a friend? Sorry, buddy. That's like taking your cousin to prom.

Giving all your passwords to your boyfriend arises from the same urge that causes young single mothers to be left startlingly alone by boys who said they'd never leave. That same urge also produces a lot of regretted tattoos.

Ah, love, fleeting as a youtube video of a cute kitten sleeping with an equally cute puppy.

But don't scorn the kids. Don't we do it, too?

Conservatives. We are conservatives. We give our votes to conservative candidates. We give our money. We can inject conservative dogma into a discussion of gardening.

Liberals. We are liberals. Our car bears the visible kiss of a Barack Obama bumper sticker. We give our personal, private email address to an organization providing us with daily liberal updates and liberal talking points from the liberal viewpoint.

And the candidates. Talking to us of love forever, love 'til the wheels fall off. Obama crooning like Sinatra. Newt Gingrich, a practiced panty-dropper, growling Barry White lyrics of family values, family values, let's make a family, just you and me baby.

Wooh! It's gettin' hot in here.

We slide into the knowing darkness of the voting booth, aware of what we are giving but believing in hope, in change, in cutting the fat, in family values and in smaller government.

Smaller government — oh, God, yes!

Ronald Reagan's avuncular leer. George W. Bush's frat-boy promises, urging you away from the Kappa keg party and upstairs to his room. Bill Clinton, the seducer of voters both in groups and individually. Obama, so young, so concerned, so needy.

You give up the passwords to him/her. You give him the vote. You get the tattoo.

We are all of us lovers. The heart of Don Juan beats beneath our dark blue work shirt, just below the stitched-on company name. Even if we can't recite so much as one of Shakespeare's sonnets, the feelings in the sonnets live between our blunt cut hair and our black "work" high heels.

You see recognition of this in some election news coverage, when the word "embrace" is used more freely than perfume at a high school dance.

"Will Southern evangelicals embrace Mitt Romney?" the otherwise staid commentator purrs, metaphorical eyebrows wiggling.

The same commentator knows in his blood that voting is coupling, and coupling can have its bitter end. His campaign pieces speak often of abandonment.

"Will Gingrich abandon the party's moderates?" the commentator asks.

Sniffles in the dark from the abandoned.

You love them in the primary, and they drop out of the race, vanishing like a baby daddy with a bus ticket to the Coast. You love them in the national, and the one you love most either loses and subsides back to a home state you've never seen or wins and moves to Washington.

After a while, the emails and the tweets stop coming.

We never grow up.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com