#4 vicarious athletes

Steelers fans rioting after the team’s win in this year’s Super Bowl: There's a reason the closest you've come to a "touchdown" is Madden NFL.

Here’s the hard and honest truth: You had nothing to do with the Steelers winning the Super Bowl, so stop saying “we did it!” What you did was slosh beer and inhale hot wings with your buddies while “your” team underwent grueling workouts, 5 a.m. practices, and faced one of the best offenses in the league.

To be clear, I’m not disparaging an interest in sports or team spirit. Who doesn’t love a man with good hand-eye-coordination and the ability to work up a healthy sweat at something other than video games? It’s forgivable for you to give pointers or even yell foul at your screen if you’ve actually made it to a sports field in the last month, but the two hours you spent creating a NCAA bracket does not mean that you are actually an athlete. And no, your fantasy football league doesn’t qualify you for a Heisman either.

Final score: athletic prowess, dealmaker; gratuitous shirtlessness post Super Bowl victory, dealbreaker.

#3. (one word) text messages

Dating nowadays has become tremendously lazy. There seems to be some backward evolution in which casual emails and ungentlemanly calls have steadily replaced face-to-face no-nonsense courting. The recent addition of texting to the picture has further muddled the dynamics of potential romance. Text messaging may be a blessing for casual communication but can alternately be a burden on budding romances, forcing women to lower our expectations. The sad reality is that nowadays, a text message a few days after a good date is sometimes enough to make some women swoon and smile for hours. But there is a floor to my standards. I draw the line at one-word text messages (OWTM).

My cellphone would vibrate with anticipation upon receiving a new text message from a guy I had dinner with. But a little part of me deflates when all I read is “What’s up”. Ok, this is two words but it might as well be OWTM. Don’t I deserve more than some generic salutation, perhaps a “How are you doing today?” My wounded pride forces me to ignore the text because the only thing worse than people who send OWTM are the people who acually respond to them.

There’s really no excuse – OWTM are embarrassingly degrading to the recipient as well as the sender. Getting a message with those non-commital “hey” or “ok” or “lol” is worse than having to deal with people who use emoticons (although admittedly the absolute worse is getting a text with just or .) It says of the sender, I am incapable of making the little extra effort to string a few more words together either because I’m a lazy idiot or you don’t deserve the whole sentence. It just makes both parties look or feel bad. So a word of advice for guilty parties: if you can’t be bothered to send a thoughtful text with a minimum of six words, then don’t bother at all.

Yes, a text message is so gosh darn convenient and easy…just like a facebook message. And that’s exactly why OWTM are illegal in my rulebook for dating.

#2. Collecting things

If you know someone who has three or more items that share a common oddball theme, that person is a “collector” and most likely, what they collect is “crap”. The other day I was a watching a Food Network program that featured people who were proudly showing off the items they had collected over the years, such as 1000 different hamburger figurines or 2000 different bottles of hot sauce. Correct me if I am wrong but this seems as pointless as Amy Winehouse swearing off drugs.

Collecting things and displaying them proudly is actually not something to be proud of. It screams you have too much time on your hands and nothing that breathes oxygen to receive your affection, that your life is so devoid of meaning that your collection of state quarters serves as a sad surrogate for happiness. Or that you are just a greedy hoarder who lacks self-control, both of which are already unsexy traits. I’m being presumptuous by speaking on behalf of my female counterparts (the normal ones anyway), but I believe most gents (the normal ones anyway) would agree as well. For either sex, nothing makes a noodle go limper than seeing your beau’s apartment for the first time and finding a shelf full of “collectible” teacups or a room filled with “collectible” Sox memorabilia. Although “collectible” from a semantic point of view means “able to collect”, that does not mean “you should collect”. There’s not even a semantic variation for that, so do us and Webster a favor and refrain from this bad habit.

Here are some examples of collecting no-no’s:

• Anything that you see featured on QVC. Why any sane person would choose to watch QVC is beyond me.
• Which includes anything that resembles a figurine – or rather a figure of anything. Your girlfriend is all the figure that you should ever need.
• As aforementioned, memorabilia. If it’s sports-related, keep it deeply hidden unless you are actually at the stadium rooting for your team. If it’s movie related, no one is impressed by your Godfather poster.
• All the different colored bottles of Vitaminwater to be aligned in a rainbow-like spectrum. You might think its clever but you should actually be recycling it.
  

Exceptions to the rule:

• Ticket stubs: There’s the sentimental value, but there’s also the other side that relishes in having physical proof that you saw Britney Spears before she went bat shit crazy.
• Random business cards that people give you. If someone annoying/unattractive asks for your business card, and you don’t have the heart to say no, just give them one from the random stack in your purse. If chosen carefully, they wont be the wiser until they actually call that person and you might just earn good karma for potentially bringing them closer to their soulmate.
• Real cars: If you are rich enough to do this, you are pretty much rich enough to do whatever the fuck you want
• Books: Literacy is sexy.

N/B: Though I’ve had the fortune of avoiding such people, knowing that they exist is enough to put this hypothetical near the top of my dealbreaker list.

#1. Vegetarians

Which animal is sexier, a lion or a lemur? If this poll was conducted, I can state with a 99% confidence interval that people would say a lion. The obvious reason is that lions are feared and respected for being ferocious and carnal. Lions eat meat.

By association, men who don’t eat meat, like herbivorous lions, are not respected but rather mocked and abandoned by their kind. There is a reason why many people don’t admit to having male friends who are vegetarians. It’s too embarrassing for everyone involved. Male vegetarians are going against the essential laws of nature and evolution. In the wilderness, carnivores eat herbivores. If a man isn’t the former, then he might as well get pushed around by the superior humans who love going to Dallas BBQ. Furthermore, our cavemen predecessors did not develop superior motor and hunting skills to spear down a mastadon just for a man to only eat hummus 3000 years later.

I love meateaters. I think the carnal act of devouring flesh and the color red is pretty sexy. Real (sexy) men eat meat. It’s a not a double standard because real (sexy) women eat meat too. I would consider myself a real (sexy) woman and if I was into girls, I would expect them to be real (sexy) in that way as well. A man who refuses to eat my pot roast is a man castrated in my eyes. Simply put, if you are a male vegetarian, you would need to grow an extra pair to compensate. Considering the near impossibility of that, the easier alternative would be for you to suck it up and enjoy a juicy steak with me. You can even order it completely well done and I wont hold it against you.

I also don’t trust male vegetarians for three reasons.

1) I dont think their protein deficient muscles could protect me from so much as a rabid duck.

2) I’m certain that they wouldn’t be able to appreciate all the Grade A goodness I have to offer myself.

And lastly but most importantly,

3) How can I enjoy picking food off their plate during our date if there’s only bland veggie mush? Sharing food as will be mentioned in another post (as well as a brilliant NYTimes article) is like sharing love. If I don’t like your food, I certainly don’t like you.