Dave Barry - Guide To Marriage And/Or Sex

The person I wish to have for a mate should be smart enough to:

1. Discuss great works of literature.

2. Hold great works of literature right side up.

3. Differentiate between great works of literature and food.

HOW TO SCORE: Add up the numbers corresponding to your answers, then check the chart below.

1 through 8 Married to somebody else.

9 through 15 Engaged to somebody else.

16 in prison.

Okay! Now that you have a good idea of what you’re looking for, it’s time to get out and join ...

The Singles Scene is located in bars that are so dark and loud it’s impossible to see or hear anybody else. You can meet, fall in love, and get engaged without ever getting a clear view of the other person, which can lead to a situation where you arrive at your wedding, with all your friends and relatives, and you discover that you are betrothed to a cigarette machine. (Which actually may not seem like such a total disaster, once you find out what else is available on the Singles Scene.)

To avoid this kind of embarrassment, you should do what other smart singles do: Before you sit down, go around the room discreetly shining a police flashlight into the other singles’ faces. Once you have selected a likely looking one, you should sit down near this person and get into a spontaneous conversation.

In the old days, the way people got into conversations was the woman would take a cigarette out of her purse and pretend to look for a match, which was the signal for six or seven available lurking men to lunge toward her, Zippos flaming, sometimes causing severe burns.

Smoking, however, has pretty much lost its glamor, to the point where trying to get a strange male to light your cigarette in public would be viewed as comparable to trying to get him to pick your nose. Which is a shame, really, because men are deprived of the chance to feel bold and masculine and necessary in the hostile bar environment. It would be nice if we had a modern bar-meeting ritual. Like maybe the woman could come in with a jar of relish, and she could sit there pretending she couldn’t get the lid off, and the man could come along and offer to help, and soon they would be engrossed in a fascinating conversation. (“Are you fond of relish? Huh! I am fond of relish myself!”)

But for now, we are stuck with the system where one party has to boldly walk right up to the other party and, with no real excuse, attempt to start a conversation. At one time this was strictly the man’s responsibility, but now, what with Women’s Liberation, it is still strictly the man’s responsibility.

Men, this is nothing to be nervous about. After all, why do you think the woman came to a singles bar, if not to meet a guy like you, only smarter and more attractive? So go to it!

The trick is to know some good “opening lines” that are guaranteed to get a woman’s attention and make her realize you are a caring and sharing kind of guy who has things on his mind such as international politics and great literature, and who doesn’t just want to grope her body.

* “How about those problems in the Middle East?”

*”How about those Brothers Karamazov?”

* “I don’t just want to grope your body. I mean, not here in the bar.”

She should attempt to fend the male off via one of the following gently tactful yet firm statements:

* “Haha HA HA HA (cough cough cough) (spit).”

* “I’m sorry, but I just washed my hair.”

* “I’m sorry, but unfortunately you hold no more physical attraction for me than those photographs you sometimes see of a cold virus magnified several million times.”

If subtlety doesn’t work, if the man turns out to be the type who views himself as such an extreme Stud Muffin that he cannot imagine a woman who would not want to conceive a child via him, then the woman should take a more direct approach, such as Mace.

These are those little paid advertisements that people take out in magazines or newspapers. A lot of people laugh at these ads, but in fact this is the way top stars such as johnny Carson and Joan Collins get most of their spouses.

If you want your ad to be effective, however, it must have certain characteristics:

1. It should say you are profoundly attractive. Nobody in the personal ads, nobody, is ever “average-looking.” If, for example, you had Elephant Man’s Disease, you would describe yourself as “rugged.”

2. It should be extremely specific. For example, if you’re a man, you don’t just say you’re looking for “a nice woman.” You say you’re looking for

“a 5’8” 23-year-old blonde Capricorn woman of Croatian ancestry weighing

109 pounds and having a degree in cultural anthropology from Duke University.” This lets everybody know you are in a position to pick and choose, and not some semi-desperate schlump who has to advertise for dates.

3. It should say you like “candlelight dinners and long walks on the beach.” All personal classified ads contain this phrase, not because anybody really wants to take long walks on the beach, but because people want to prove they’re Romantic and Sensitive. The beaches of America are teeming with couples who met because of personal ads, staggering along, sweating, and picking sea-urchin spines out of their feet, each person afraid to reveal to the other that he or she would rather be watching a rental movie.

Often it seems that the happiest marriages are the ones where the man and the woman share an interest in a hobby, like bass fishing. Because of this shared interest, such couples can pass countless intimate hours together, talking bait, plus they can use their vacation time to go on long fishing trips to secluded wilderness areas where they will find time to just be alone together, hour after hour, day after day, on some scum-encrusted, mosquito-infested lake, totally alone, until finally one of them disembowels the other with a scaling knife.

To get into a relationship like this, you need to develop an interest, preferably one that does not involve sharp implements, and go hang out with other people who have the same interest. Let’s say, for example, that you have an interest in cats. Now I, personally, cannot imagine having any interest in cats other than to find out what happens when you submerge them for various lengths of time in roofing cement, but I am sure there are lots of formal pro-cat organizations in your area, which you could locate by asking a police officer. Go to their meetings and survey the crowd until you find a likely prospect to strike up a conversation with (“Hi! I see we share an interest in cats! Perhaps we should get married!”).

If this doesn’t work, you might try stamp collectors, or one of your major churches.

If you get an office job, you’ll be involved in a serious relationship within a matter of days. This is the good news. The bad news is, this relationship will probably involve a person who is technically already married to somebody else. This is because, to a married person, the office is a highly romantic environment, where everybody wears nice clothes and discusses important issues such as the Three-Month Sales Forecast, in stark contrast to the home environment, where people tend to wear bathrobes with jelly stains on them and get into vicious day-long arguments over who put the ice tray back in the refrigerator with a dead roach in it (see Chapter 8, “How to Argue Like a Veteran Married Couple”). So the office becomes essentially a large, carpeted pit of illicit passion, where at least two-thirds of the activity is related to motel arrangements.