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.

Whatever method you use to meet somebody, your next step is to go on a number (174) of dates so you can get to know what this person is really like.

1. He brings his mom.

2. He smells bad.

3. He smells a little too good.

4. He proudly carries the American Express Platinum Card.

5. He periodically blows his nose elaborately into a handkerchief, then folds it up carefully and puts it back into his pocket as though it was some kind of valuable artifact.

6. He wants to take you to a hockey game.

7. He wants to know if you know how to clean fish.

8. He always calls the waitress “Sweets.”

9. He manages to let you know how much money he makes by some contrivance such as pulling a piece of paper out of his pocket and saying: “I’ll be darned! Here’s my W-2 form!”

10. He wears wing-tip shoes when he doesn’t have to.

11. He has pictures of his car.

12. He has a personalized license plate on his car.

13. He has motivational cassette tapes in his car.

“Dating” simply means “going out with a potential mate and doing a lot of fun things that the two of you will never do again if you actually get married.” Dating is a very important part of the mate-selection process throughout all of nature. Some sectors of nature, such as insects, date for only a few seconds; birds, on the other hand, perform an elaborate Dating Dance. In fact, dancing is all that birds can do, because in order to make it possible for them to fly, they cannot have sexual organs, which is why we have to import flocks of new birds from Canada every year.

Human beings dated as far back as ancient times, as is shown by the biblical quotation: “And Balzubio DID taketh Parasheeba to a restaurant, and they DID eateth potato skins.” The next recorded date was between Romeo and Juliet, a young Italian couple who went out despite their parents’ objections, and just about everybody involved ended up either stabbed or poisoned.

After this tragedy, there was very little dating for several centuries. During this time, marriages were arranged by the parents, based on such things as how much cattle the bride and the groom would each bring to the union. Often the young couple wouldn’t even meet until the wedding, and sometimes they were not strongly attracted to each other. Sometimes, quite frankly, they preferred the cattle. So now we feel that dating is probably a better system.

As we noted earlier, these are free and liberated and nonstereotypical times we live in, by which I mean it is the responsibility of the man to ask for the date, and the responsibility of the woman to think up excuses that get progressively more obvious until the man figures out that the woman would rather chew on a rat pancreas.

1. Go to a restaurant and have something to eat.

2. Go to a restaurant and have a completely different thing to eat.

3. Go to a completely different restaurant.

4. Go to visit interesting places such as New York and Europe and see if they have any restaurants.

1. Your various entrees.

When two people have been on enough dates, they generally fall in love. You can tell you’re in love by the way you feel: your head becomes light, your heart leaps within you, you feel like you’re walking on air, and the whole world seems like a wonderful and happy place. Unfortunately these are also the four warning signs of colon disease, so it’s always a good idea to check with your doctor.

But if it turns out to be love, it’s time to think about taking the next major step in a relationship: French-kissing.

Ha ha! just kidding. The next major step is to live in Sin, which we will cover in the next chapter. Of course if you belong to a religious sect that believes that a couple should get married first, you should skip the next chapter and go straight to the one about sex, unless it is a very strict religious sect, in which case you should burn this book immediately.

For many years, it was generally considered to be wrong to live in Sin. Now, however, thanks to the Sexual Revolution (May 6, 1967), living together is considered a normal and in fact very useful phase in a relationship, a phase that is accepted and even endorsed by virtually all sectors of society except of course your parents. Your parents hate it. it doesn’t matter how nice or respectable the person is you’re living with. You could be living with Abraham Lincoln, and your parents would still hate it. Especially if you are a guy.

But, hey, it’s your life to live, and if you really want to move in with somebody, your feelings have to take precedence over your parents’. The best thing to do is confront their concerns head-on, by sitting down with them, face to face, and lying.

“Mom and Dad,” you should say, “Bill and I are not living together. He came over to my apartment this morning to help me kill a spider and by mistake he left his toothbrush and all his clothes and furniture.”

Your parents will pretend they believe you, because the truth is they really don’t want to even think about the idea of you and S-E-X. All parents are like this. No matter how old you get, in their minds you will always have the wisdom and emotional maturity of Beaver Cleaver.

Moving in together is an exciting and romantic adventure for both of you, a time of caring and sharing the joys of little discoveries such as what another person’s used dental floss looks like. But this is also a time when you must try to be practical. You must bear in mind that no matter how much you love each other now, somewhere down the road you will inevitably have traditional “lovers’ quarrels” wherein one of you will hurl all of the other one’s possessions out the window and possibly kill an innocent pedestrian. This is why most experts recommend that you get a ground-floor apartment furnished mainly with lightweight, easy-to-hurl Tupperware.