Mardy Grothe - Neverisms

Never go out with anyone who has a guru.

Never go out with anyone who has been seeing a psychiatrist for eleven years.

Never go out with anyone who remembers high school like it was only yesterday.

Never become involved with someone who can

make you lose stature if the relationship becomes known.

Sleep up.ARISTOTLE ONASSIS, quoting his father

This remarkable piece of fatherly advice was revealed in Onassis: An Extravagant Life , a 1977 biography by Frank Brady. At age eleven, the sexually precocious young Onassis was interrupted by his stepmother as he was about to complete his first sexual liaison (with the daughter of one of the household servants). Onassis was reprimanded by his stepmother and grandmother, but the father took the boy aside and told him he was more upset by his choice of a mere servant girl. It was advice Onassis apparently took to heart, as later evidenced by his first marriage to Athina Livanos, the daughter of a wealthy Greek shipping magnate, then his notorious extramarital affair with opera diva Maria Callas, and, ultimately, his 1968 marriage to Jacqueline Kennedy.

Never do anything to your partner with your teeth

that you wouldn’t do to an expensive waterproof wristwatch.P. J. O’ROURKE, offering “a rule of common courtesy” during oral sex

Never judge a painting or a woman by candlelight.ITALIAN PROVERB

This proverb was inspired by a passage from Ovid’s classic The Art of Love , a guide to seduction written in the first century A.D. Ovid began by writing, “Don’t judge a woman by candlelight, it’s deceptive. If you really want to know what she looks like, look at her by daylight, and when you’re sober.” And then he concluded, “Night covers a multitude of blemishes and imperfections. At night there is no such thing as an ugly woman.” His observation also likely inspired these other proverbs:

Never choose bedlinen or a wife by candlelight.

Never choose a wife by candlelight,

nor a friend at a feast, nor a horse at a fair.

Never try to pick up a woman who is wearing a Super Bowl ring.GARRY SHANDLING

Never ask a woman why she’s angry at you.

She will either get angrier at you for not knowing, or she’ll tell you.

Both ways, you lose.IAN SHOALES, as the alter ego of writer & performer Merle Kessler

Never date a woman whose father calls her “Princess.”

Chances are she believes it.WES SMITH, in Welcome to the Real World (1987)

In his compendium of advice for recent high school and college graduates, Smith also offered these rules:

Never date a man who goes shopping with his mother.

Never date someone you work with. Especially the boss.

Never answer an advertisement seeking a “liberal room-mate.”

You probably are not that liberal.

“Never Choose a Loser”ABIGAIL VAN BUREN, title of “ Dear Abby ” column

In a 1978 column, a fifteen-year-old Washington state girl asked Abby for advice about dating a twenty-nine-year-old divorced man who worked in a gas station. In writing the headline, Van Buren was probably influenced by the girl’s comment, “The poor guy has really had a messed-up life.” Abby finished with this admonition: “Never have anything to do with a fellow you can’t bring home and introduce to your parents.”

Never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.GORE VIDAL

Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel,

for love is not ours to command.ALAN WATTS

Never ask a woman her weight on the first date.MICHAEL WEATHERLY

Weatherly said this as Special Agent Anthony “Tony” DiNozzo in a Season One episode of NCIS in 2003. In a Season Four episode, he offered another dehortation: “Never date a woman who eats more than you do.” 1. Never put makeup on at a table. 2. Never ask a man where he has been. 3. Never keep him waiting. 4. Never baby him when he is disconsolate. 5. Never fail to baby him when he is sick or has a hangover. 6. Never let him see you when you are not at your best. 7. Never talk about your other dates or boyfriends of the past.MAE WEST , in “How to Hold a Man” (1935), quoted

by W. Safire and L. Safir in Words of Wisdom (1990)

Never let a man define who you are.OPRAH WINFREY, attributed, but not verified

For several years, this and a number of other Winfrey quotations have been widely circulated on the Internet, often under the heading, “What Oprah Winfrey Had to Say about Men.” They have never been documented, and neither I nor other quotation researchers have been able to verify them. Some are quite interesting, though, especially the neverisms. Even though I can’t vouch for their authenticity, here they are:

Never co-sign for a man.

Never borrow someone else’s man.

Never move into his mother’s house.

Never let a man know everything. He will use it against you later.

Never live your life for a man before you find what makes you truly happy.

I attribute my whole success in life

to a rigid observance of the fundamental rule—

Never have yourself tattooed with any woman’s name,

not even her initials.P. G. WODEHOUSE, from a character in French Leave (1956)

Never give the heart outright.WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

This is a line from “Never Give All the Heart,” a 1904 poem stimulated by Yeats’s legendary—and famously unrequited—love for Maud Gonne. The entire first stanza of the poem looks like a recognition on Yeats’s part that he might have erred by coming on a bit too soon and a bit too strong: Never give all the heart, for love Will hardly seem worth thinking of To passionate women if it seem Certain. . . .

ten

Never Change Diapers in Mid-Stream

Marriage, Home & Family Life

In the early morning of July 6, 2008, Susan Striker, a Greenwich, Connecticut, art teacher, engaged in a familiar morning ritual—retrieving the early edition of the New York Times from her doorstep, making herself a cup of hot tea, and settling back into bed for a relaxing morning read. After skimming over the front-page headlines and perusing her favorite sections, she arrived at the op-ed page, where her eyes were immediately drawn to the words “An Ideal Husband,” the title of a Maureen Dowd column.

In writing her column that week, Dowd was inspired by a remark that supermodel Christie Brinkley had recently made in divorce proceedings against husband Peter Cook, a prominent New York architect. After discovering that Cook had been having an affair with his eighteen-year-old assistant and paying out more than three grand a month for Internet porn and swinger websites, Brinkley said: “The man who I was living with, I just didn’t know who he was.”

As Dowd reflected on Brinkley’s remark, she found herself wondering what a woman would need to do to avoid such a sad and painful outcome. To answer the question, she interviewed Pat Connor, a seventy-nine-year-old Roman Catholic priest living in New Jersey. Connor, with over forty years of experience as a marriage counselor, had distilled his lifetime of experience into a lecture for high school seniors—girls mainly—that he titled “Whom Not to Marry.” When he was asked to summarize his talk, the first thing he offered was this rule: