You can’t change the one you love. Your significant other isn’t a fixer-upper that you can repaint, renovate, and redecorate to suit your whims. Loving someone for who they could be, should be or as you see them in your dreams isn’t love: it’s self-absorption that says more about your own flaws than theirs. To totally massacre President Kennedy’s famous call to action, ask not what love can do for you, but what you can do for love.

To many women, looking stylish is a total obsession. And I don’t think you dress to kill to impress the men in your lives, because we just aren’t that picky, nor are our tastes refined enough to offer substantial critiques. I gave up watching “Project Runway” (the female equivalent of UFC) after the second season because I always backed the losing designer, without fail.  I think it’s a ladies-only horse race. Women dress up for other women. Dudes are casual spectators of your beloved sport.

When the current woman I’m dating (I know how you ladies love nicknames, so let’s just call her “the current woman I’m dating” or TCWID) dolls up, she makes me sweat like a prom date.  She looks beautiful and reminds me of a cactus flower: a colorful, delicate, powerful little bloom that a thorny, ugly world shouldn’t produce but does. And then there are the nights where she greets me at her door wearing nothing but a t-shirt, boy shorts and glasses and my heart high-fives my brain. Packaging isn’t a huge priority to men. But that doesn’t mean we don’t appreciate the short skirts.

It is not important for my girlfriend’s father to like me; we are all far too concerned in this modern age with being “liked.” There is no virtue in the pursuit of instant, superficial approval. Her father and I aren’t peers, or buddies, and we’re not dating. I’m the dude who’s nailing his little princess, and our entire relationship is based on one thing and one thing only—that I’m making his daughter happy. One of the ways a man makes his beloved happy is by meeting her dad, something no man likes to do. These meetings are like high-level diplomatic negotiations between nations, rife with courtliness, subtext, and menace. We meet the father not because we want to, but because it makes you happy. And that’s all he wants to know.

There are only two reasons why I’d move in and live with another girlfriend. We’re married and determined to fill a sweatshop with our nimble-fingered love critters. Or she cracks me in the head with a shovel, sews my mouth shut, replaces my eyeballs with marbles, and sits my stuffed body in the corner. Whatever you do, don’t move in with your boyfriend. What? It’s too late? Sweet Zeus, Odin, and Quetzalcoatl, winged serpent god of the Aztecs! I hope your cohabitation doesn’t end the way two (two!) of mine did – with helicopters launching off the roof amidst tornadoes of debris and smoke, a single individual hanging off the skids, flipping the bird to the person whose name is on the lease.

Men should buy women flowers. They are colorful. They smell nice. And without them, flora would never get laid. To many, purchasing flowers is cliché or corny or tacky. And to others, it’s an outdated ritual in our modern era of gender equality. I’d like to address the men reading this (all five of you): buy the broads flowers. Trust me. And now to all the women reading, who outnumber us dudes 100 to 1: allow the douches in your life to buy you flowers. Trust me. 

Women always seem to ask me where all the good men are, as if these near-mythical dudes are hiding behind bushes, chained up in some vampire’s basement, or are just rare and elusive, like the snow leopard. Normally, I have to resist responding, “Maybe the good guys are just avoiding you.” But the answer to this frequent, lovelorn lament is simple: The good men are right under your nose. And that’s the damn truth.

The old cliché warns against judging a book by its cover, and this is especially true when sizing up a lover. You just can’t tell how sexually adventurous a person is by looking at them. Appearances don’t always deceive; sometimes they just obscure the truth. And I’ve learned over the years that just because she looks Amish, doesn’t mean she doesn’t have a vibrator the size of a jackhammer under her bed.

When I try to explain my ardor for HBO’s trashy-fabulous soap opera “True Blood” to my dude friends, they either shrug and change the topic, or question whether I’ve been writing for ladyblogs for too long and am suffering from a form of Stockholm Syndrome. Dudes just don’t dig bloodsuckers, since vampires pretty much look like girls. We prefer zombies, because we love chainsaws, flamethrowers, and samurai swords. And because, on some level, we know that besides being vehicles for sperm, our other important, if lesser, genetic imperative is to defend our loved ones from hordes of unthinking, flesh-eating metaphors for current social anxieties.

Recently, I read a post about the lessons women want to teach their daughters about men and their relationships. Many excellent experiences were shared, possibly too many. Then again, little girls are more cerebral than their male counterparts. Little boys require simple instructions: fire bad, truth good, rifles are not telescopes. For the sake of my future son—a hypothetical if ever there were one— I will keep it straightforward and tell him the one thing he needs to know about women. It is something his old man has learned over years and years of wrapping relationships around trees: Listen to the women in your life. Of course, if I had followed my own dad’s example, and just did what he did, which was pay my mother undivided attention when she spoke, I wouldn’t have had to learn things the hard way.

You’ll never see a dude turn to another dude and ask, “Do I look fat in these pants?” But that doesn’t mean men are invulnerable to insecurities, no matter how much we’d like to think so. Women are upfront about their fears, doubts, and self-esteem. I used to think it was just compulsive gabbiness, a quirk of the fairer sex. But, in fact, it is an admirable coping mechanism that’s even a little bit courageous. That said, I’ll sack up and admit that I’ve spent a lot of my life feeling like a fatty, a chubasaurus, half-man and half-marshmallow.

When it comes to sex, women talk too much and men talk too little. Actually, let me revise that. Women talk too much about sex with one another, and men talk about sex with one another just enough, which is to say, hardly at all. While my gender may have the occasional communication skills of an ATM and all the emotional agility of limbless baboons, there are things we can teach your gender, the hyper-articulate, deep feeling, lavender-soap-smelling variety. Namely, it is not always necessary to divulge every single sordid detail about what happened Friday night. Now, don’t you feel liberated?

There are plenty of things men don’t understand about women. Like why you insist on leaving the toilet seat down. Or buy candles that smell like food. Would somebody please explain the allure of gloomy teenage vampires dry humping? To be fair, there are plenty of things women don’t understand about men. Like why we find flatulence so amusing. In the interest of gender relations, I will explain this.

I’ve learned a lot of things from the women in my life. How to appreciate wine, do my own taxes, not be a douchebag. And because of them, I am a fan of Pinot Noir, keep a shoebox of receipts, and am a fan of Pinot Noir. But more on this later.

Sex without dirty talk is a bland affair, like chicken nuggets without the hot mustard. Without that whispered verbal communication and the trust that goes with it, body and mind aren’t connected. No, I’m not getting all Deepak Chopra all up in this joint. Sex is a brain thing as much as a skin thing. Without uncensored, honest, blushing dirty talk in bed (or the backseat, stairwell, or under the kitchen table) there is no way to find out if she needs it faster or slower. You’d never learn that she likes her hair pulled to the left, while you softly kiss her jaw line on the right side of her face. Apparently, there’s a world of difference between a flick and a pinch. These are important facts, and the reverse is true when you’re with your man.

When it comes to “feminism,” I have more questions than answers. So I emailed Sady at the smart, free-wheeling lady blog Tiger Beatdown and asked her if she’d answer some of them. In the interest of full disclosure, she has, on occasion, offered succinct and thoughtful analysis of some of my work on this site. I realize that what I know about “feminism,” specifically its recent history and its academic role, could fit into a thimble. My questions might seem basic, but remember, I’m the one with the testicles over here. 

A reader sent me an email and asked me if I would ever date someone with an incurable STD. She had recently been diagnosed with the HSV virus (that’s herpes, y’all), and wanted my answer to be honest and not “PC.” So here it is goes, my unvarnished, gut reaction to the question: No, I would not date someone with an incurable STD.

Here’s my worst first date story: she told me she was lactose intolerant, but ordered the French onion soup. I thought, “How irresponsible.” Every woman I know has at least one horrifying dating disaster tale. Most women have multiple ones. They usually begin with “I met him on Match.com” or “He was the best friend of my second cousin’s college roommate” and end with a daring escape, a mad dash into a cab, and unhinged texts from the guy for the next two weeks.

It was a total misunderstanding that one time I bought a woman I was dating sexy lingerie, the slinky, lacy kind that looked like it was made out of the doilies that decorated my grandmother’s beloved sofa. She thought I was disingenuously buying her a gift that was really a gift for me. I protested, of course, because it was never my idea to veer into Victoria Secret’s during one of our weekend shopping excursions that were theoretically about her training me to be, if not fashion forward, then at least fashion neutral. A happy compromise, considering I, apparently, was clinging to late-‘90s fashion like a koala bear to the last eucalyptus tree on Earth. But, in fact, these sprees were about her dragging me by the throat to store after store.

I don’t believe that once a cheater, always a cheater. That specific aphorism is a bitter, moralizing form of self-deception. We all are cheaters; none of us is invulnerable to temptation. What defines a person is not whether they are faithless. It is a simple, easy thing to impulsively take that which you want. No, what defines a person is whether they chose to stay faithful. That is difficult, and that active decision, that vigilance, is the steep price love demands.

If it weren’t for the covers of women’s magazines like Glamopolitan, my time standing in grocery lines would be spent reading the copy on my frozen dinners. It’s amazing how reading “succulent tenderloins cradled by fluffy mashed potatoes” makes a meal squeezed out of a nozzle and flash frozen taste that much better. It was standing in line with my pathetic pyramid of bachelor food that I learned that there are, like, 1,342 different ways to drive me wild.

And here I was, thinking there was only one, 100% guaranteed way to drive me wild, and that was to touch my penis. At this juncture, I’d like to state that I’m also speaking for all of dudekind. Sweeping gender platitudes is what I do. So take the ice cube out of your mouth, the feather out of my ass, and go for the gold. Is there a Nobel Prize for sex advice? I’d like to thank you all.

Groucho Marx once famously quipped “I don’t care to belong to a club that would have me as a member.” I sort of feel the same way about online dating sites. There has got to be a better way to meet people, people. Sadly, mental telepathy does not work. Unless you know what I was just thinking, in which case, e-mail me.

I’ve recently begun… researching popular dating sites. Not because I need a date. Ho, no, no, no. I don’t need a date. I’m up to my man boobs in hot lady action. There’s an 85% chance of boobs forecast in my love life. I am the Mayor of Vagtown. No, this research is for you, for all of you. It’s a testament to my generosity of spirit I waded through these interweb love sewers in order to impart some sort of wisdom. Here’s the wisdom: dating sites blow.