You know, you come to India thinking the Taj Mahal was this grand gesture of love, like the universe’s wedding ring or some milestone anniversary gift. Then you learn it was built because some poor woman died giving birth to her 14th child.

Fourteenth! Imagine you’re Mumtaz dying in childbirth and waking up in the afterlife, only to hear your husband Jahan, the Shah, is building a billion-dollar shrine.

“Darling, could you not just send flowers?”

If I died giving birth to No. 14, I’d hope my husband’s first act of mourning would be a vasectomy.

The devotion. It’s touching. I’d have been more touched by contraception.

The Taj Mahal is proof men are at their most creative when they’re catastrophically sad and ridiculously wealthy.

We’ve all been there. Maybe not 10,000-ton-riverfront-white-marble-tomb “there,” but emotionally? Same ballpark. You screw up, you go too far trying to fix it. It’s the universal male instinct. You buy something shiny. And hope the problem goes away.

You just can’t call it undying love if it killed her — you can’t! And he immortalizes himself as the grieving one? He didn’t build it for her so much as he built it so everyone would talk about him loving her. “Let’s erect something enormous so everyone knows I feel bad.”

“It took 22,000 workers and 22 years,” the tour guide bellowed. Twenty-two years perfecting his sad eyes.

I smiled like someone who’s never been loved expensively or at all.

When they said “eternal love,” most of the workers heard “eternal shift;” proof that, even four centuries ago, men couldn’t handle a breakup. The real tragedy isn’t Mumtaz’s death. It’s that thousands were dragged into one man’s feelings.

You imagine those guys in a hush, “He’s still crying, keep carving.”

Every chiseled petal says, “Next time, just move on, man.”

But “he never remarried,” the guide says.

I thought, “loser mentality.”

The perfect curves you see were probably carved by a man silently muttering, “This is b*lls**t.”

And the guy next to him was like, imagine the gossip mill, “You think she was even that hot?” and suddenly there’s a fight, half the workforce divided into Team Mumtaz and Team She-Was-Mid.

It’s strange to stand before something so grand and realize it was built entirely by people who only wanted to go home.

But apparently, in that century, no one knew how to pull out of anything. Fourteen pregnancies. Thousands of workers. Not one of them could talk him out of it. Which tells you everything about power and nothing about love.

People say it’s symmetrical. I say it’s suspicious. Nothing that perfect is honest.

By the way, when it was done, legend has it that the Shah cut off the workers’ hands so they couldn’t build another one because his grief will always be bigger than yours.

His son threw him in jail. With a view of his own creation. Maybe he caught him crying. “Aren’t you over it yet?”

Kids these days, no respect. Nepo babies — give them a private jet and they’d still whine.

Either way, it works. You come, you feel emotional. And then you buy a souvenir. Genius. Then it occurs to you that you’re about to lose the battle with your bladder. Marble this big and no washroom!? F**k this. You wander, twisting like someone who has ever regretted every single life choice that led you to this moment, trying not to pee on 400-year-old grief.

It’s a reminder. Love kills. Sometimes slowly, sometimes through urinary retention.

After the longest, most absurdly triumphant life ever lived (mine, by the way), I want a Taj Mahal. Bigger. With golf, a zipline, and something that says, “He loved very deeply… and accepts GCash.” Because everyone talks about Mumtaz, but who built the thing? Me. That’s who.