Here is what the companies that manufacture hummingbird feed are praying you don’t discover: Using pantry ingredients, it’s a breeze to make perfectly serviceable nectar in your own kitchen. Mix one part sugar with four parts tepid water. Swirl until it’s all the color of a fogged window pane. That’s it. And you know what else? Homemade hummingbird nectar tastes like an afternoon in heaven — like warm air that has been lightly sweetened. You would be crazy not to help yourself to a glass or two while you’re whipping it up, even if it means you end up filling every hummingbird feeder a little less. In fact — here is what the hummingbirds are praying you don’t discover — you owe birds nothing; once you’ve finished preparing it, you can keep the whole cocktail for yourself.

I love two things in this world: sugar and myself. One result of my nonstop efforts to delight myself is that I end up consuming, every day, vast quantities of sugar. Oh, my God, I forgot my husband. Sorry, I love three things in this world: sugar and myself and my husband. Now that you bring him up, my husband, who is very dear to me, is worth mentioning. He does not love sugar.

What my husband enjoys is scaling new peaks of health. My interminable quest to attain additional sugar is an inexhaustible source of stress for him. Here is a scene, variations of which play out with impressive regularity in our house: My husband sticks his head around a doorway and says something like: “There are 30 empty packets of Gushers in the trash can. Do you know anything about that?” I (completely horizontal on the couch) lock eyes with him — a capo squaring off against Quantico’s newest class clown. “I never heard anything about that in my life,” I say. I keep staring until he walks away.

The savvy reader may suspect that I exaggerate for comedic effect. Am I, a (just barely) 35-year-old woman, truly habitually eating many, many pouches of Strawberry Splash Gushers and trying to hide all evidence of this from my husband? The answer reminds me of something from the third season of Bravo’s “Ladies of London” TV series, which I will devote the rest of this paragraph to describing. The context for this scene is that Juliet, who is not from London, is trying to become friends with Sophie’s then-sister-in-law Caroline … Now that I can be reasonably certain that my husband has stopped reading and skipped ahead, allow me to grab your wrist way too tight and hiss-whisper that, yes, I’ve got goodies hidden all over this house that he doesn’t know about, that he will never and can never know about. Maybe twice a year, the man I love stumbles upon a private cache of, for instance, Dunkaroos and accuses me of hiding them. “They’re not hidden,” I say — which is 100 percent true in that moment. “That’s where we keep those.” (In a drawer he didn’t know our house contained.) Hear me when I say this: I do not hide the high-octane sugar treats that I buy in bulk from Amazon from my spouse because I fear he would criticize me for eating them or exert any undue influence over what I eat; he has never done anything like that. He is really nice; you can ask anyone. I do it because I fear it would distress this kind man to comprehend the true amount of sugar I’m devouring in a given day and also because I dread the unlikely but not impossible scenario in which he, God forbid, asks to try my Strawberry Sensation Fruit Roll-Ups with Tongue Tattoos on Every Roll and enjoys them, and wants them to be something he and I share (happened with Swedish Fish!!!). There are only 10 Strawberry Sensation Fruit Roll-Ups inside every box of the 10-pack of boxes I have on auto-delivery on Amazon — not enough for two people. And that’s why, ultimately, I side with Sophie in that episode of “Ladies of London.”

I would be happy to eat what my husband does if any of it tasted as good as Strawberry Sensation Fruit Roll-Ups. The problem is that it doesn’t — not even close. I know this marks me out as an immature deviant among my age cohort. I envy the ease with which my acquaintances casually consume coffee, red wine, beer and broccoli rabe in social settings. These I can sip, nibble or mime ingesting; in truth, I am unable to choke down a single serving of any one and no more likely to crave them than printer toner or plywood.