This, my friends, is what Tumblr was made for: Hot Guys Reading Books. (BG has a friend who had to break up with someone when he discovered the only books she read were her own dream journals.) Gotta say, when it comes to relationships, reading is fundamental.

Now how about Hot Guys Buying Cheese?

I just can’t quit you on February 2, 1998…

Dear Breakup Girl,

Two years ago I was involved with a great guy. We were compatible intellectually, romantically and sexually, but he moved 2,000 miles away and after an attempt to do the long distance thing, we broke it off. We remained good friends and corresponded regularly.

Now he is returning to his old neighborhood and thinks we should get together again. I’m all for it except for one problem. He is a smoker and I am a militant nonsmoker (the really annoying kind) with an allergy to cigarettes to boot! He was trying to quit when we first started dating, but since the move west, he gave up the effort. He likes it and he doesn’t care if it kills him. I try to get him not to do it around me during some of his visits home, but he does not always oblige. Even if the hacking cough didn’t always surface, the knot in the pit of my stomach every time he lights up (even when we speak on the phone) never goes away.

I don’t want this to become a power struggle. We are both stubborn, hard-headed people at times (hell, I guess that’s why we’re so compatible) and fighting about it goes nowhere. I really do want to see him again and possibly resume the relationship. How can I learn to adjust my attitude and still maybe, possibly take that chance in Hell that I can somehow encourage him to stop or at least compromise?

— Healthy Lungs in NY

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Gawker’s SciFi blog i09 flirts with the eternal question — also explored on How I Met Your Mother — “Sure they love me, but can they love my Star Wars?”

It’s all fun and games until the Firefly box is opened, and all of a sudden you’re caught defending space pirates. How I Met Your Mother’s season premiere perfectly covered this silly question that those of us with short fuses and huge science fiction collections often find ourselves in….It’s a sweet look at the geeking out we all do when our most favorite movie is on and you really, really hope that your friend/buddy/significant other/or homeless guy on the street will enjoy it as much as you will. The nice thing about HIMYM’s take on the “deal breaker” movie is that at least Sarah Chalke was smart enough to lie. Which is my advice to those of you just getting into the scifi game.

Just this week a beautiful girl approached me and asked what she should do as she “discovered” her fiances’ in-depth collection of Star Trek episodes. I told her to ask him to play her his favorite episodes that he thought she would like, open a bottle of wine (or two), and if she didn’t like it just let him know he can have all the fun friend time he wants with his buddies that want to come over for Trek marathons.

I’m not saying all relationships lacking a mutual love of sci fi are totally lost to the dark side, but if your love interest isn’t willing to at least sample your geeky taste along with a bottle of wine, maybe they are not the droid you’re looking for?

(Bonus: io9 also asks this excellent question: “My favorite can-not-live-with-out-deal-breaker-if-they-don’t-at-least-pretend-to-like-it movie is and probably always will be Aliens. What’s yours?”)

Speaking of deconstruction, here’s a piece from Sunday’s New York Times Book Review:

At least since Dante’s Paolo and Francesca fell in love over tales of Lancelot, literary taste has been a good shorthand for gauging compatibility. These days, thanks to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, listing your favorite books and authors is a crucial, if risky, part of self-branding. When it comes to online dating, even casual references can turn into deal breakers. “Sussing out a date’s taste in books is ‘actually a pretty good way — as a sort of first pass — of getting a sense of someone,” said Anna Fels, a Manhattan psychiatrist and the author of Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives. “It’s a bit of a Rorschach test.'”

<snip>

James Collins, whose new novel, Beginner’s Greek, is about a man who falls for a woman he sees reading The Magic Mountain on a plane, recalled that after college, he was “infatuated” with a woman who had a copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being on her bedside table. “I basically knew nothing about Kundera, but I remember thinking, ‘Uh-oh; trendy, bogus metaphysics, sex involving a bowler hat,’ and I never did think about the person the same way (and nothing ever happened),” he wrote in an e-mail message. “I know there were occasions when I just wrote people off completely because of what they were reading long before it ever got near the point of falling in or out of love: Baudrillard (way too pretentious), John Irving (way too middlebrow), Virginia Woolf (way too Virginia Woolf).” Come to think of it, Collins added, “I do know people who almost broke up” over The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen: “‘Overrated!’ ‘Brilliant!’ ‘Overrated!’ ‘Brilliant!’”

For me, honestly, the literary dealbreaker I recall most clearly was the guy who had no books. What about you? Which suitors have you judged — fairly or not — by their covers? Post your mini-memoir here.

Here, your weekly installment of Ask Lynn, BG’s alter ego’s column at MSN.com (powered by Match.com). Today we meet “Is Beauty Only Skin Deep?”, who has met someone of her own — online, anyway. Endless phone calls, round-the-clock IM, talk of marriage, sheer bliss…at least over optical fiber. But when her fella finally sees her photo (yes, after the M-word comes up), it’s perhaps his true face that shows. His response: “You’re pretty, but can you call again when you lose some weight?”

That, or when pigs fly?

Read the whole shebang, and then come back here to comment!

Now that Eliot Spitzer has resigned, we can put this sex business behind us and get back to BUSINESSbusiness.

Oh, wait.

First we find out that a former aide to former New Jersey governor James McGreevey has come forward, classily, to allege that he was the third wheel, as it were, in a series of three-way “sex romps” with Mr. McGreevy and his ex-wife-to-be, Diana Matos McGreevey. (Or, more to the point, that she was the third wheel.) My first reaction to this revelation (which the missus has denied, by the way) was a resounding “TMI!”

Then we hear about the Patersons. We hear a LOT about the Patersons. Boils down to this: things got rocky. He had affairs. So did she. They dealt.

Then I realized: this is more than a matter of TMI. The universe, my friends, is trying to tell us something. That we should focus as much as possible on the prurient details of politicians’ private utterly human failings — failings that are not at odds with their ability to govern or gain public trust — instead of on ending poverty and war? No, the other thing: remember how easy it was to judge Silda Spitzer? With these new revelations (regardless of their veracity) we are reminded: you never, ever know.

Now can we please get back to work ?

“I’m crazy about her!” “My ex is a psycho hose beast!” It is customary, and often fitting, to dip into the lexicon of mania to describe love and its effects, salutary or otherwise. But what happens when real mental illness — the kind that shows up in the DSM — shows up in our relationships?

Breakup Girl has dealt with that issue here and elsewhere. And now, an essay from Nerve.com by Justin Clark, which just surfaced via Alternet, offers a compelling personal read about what it’s like to love someone bipolar. It is possible, Clark maintains, even fascinating and rewarding. “When I looked at Sara, I felt inspiration, not pity,” he says of the date on which she outed herself as bipolar. “And even though I’m not the type to plunge quickly into relationships, I was convinced I was in love. I invited her back to my place. Aside from a quick trip to clean out her studio apartment a few weeks later, she never went home. ‘Of the two of us,’ I told her as we lay happily in bed, ‘I must be the crazier one.'” Read the rest here. It’s harrowing and lovely. (And after that, after all these dark posts about DSMs and STIs and Client 9s — crazy, right? — we promise to lighten things up for you ASAP.)

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: With every breaking political sex scandal — and the ensuing awkward press conference/photo opp — it becomes more and more tempting to imagine little thought balloons over the heads of the apparently stoic, forbearing wives. (“Well, this explains a lot.” “Game face game face game face.” “Dude. Diapers?”)

And man, is it easy to judge. The wives, not the husbands. (Well, them too.) What are they doing at the press conference at all? What sort of public display of solidarity do they possibly owe these guys? Can they really be such doormats? Why aren’t they home changing the locks?

In situations like these, though, I think we’d do well to remember the wise words of Bridget Jones’s friend Magda. “No one from the outside ever really understands what makes them work.” Really, who knows what has gone on Chez Spitzer? Maybe she is cheating too. Maybe he promised her a quick and clean divorce if she’d do just this one thing. Maybe she is even acting out of savvy self-interest, as Anne Applebaum suggests at Slate: “I can see one clear advantage to this option: It’s all over quickly. And no one asks you for a follow-up interview. You appear once—and then you vanish forever, along with your husband’s career. If you’ve been clever about it, you’ve kept your maiden name and can thus return to your own career. Those who make other, more attention-getting choices will later be forced back into the limelight to explain themselves, which is gruesome.” That, or if you simply don’t appear at all, you can bet they’ll come after you.

I’m not saying she should or shouldn’t show up; I’m just saying that in a scandal such as this, her conduct, of all people’s, is not for us to judge. (I’m talking to YOU, lady I just heard on WNYC saying that this whole thing was Mrs. Spitzer’s fault in the first place because she didn’t kink things up enough.) The real thing to question is not each wife’s motive, or her backbone. The real thing to question, I think, is why these women are expected to show up in the first place. (And what will happen someday when the “stoic wife” is the husband.)

Turns out dating across the aisle could be a Capitol idea…

 

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For Shakespeare, music is the food of love. For me, food is the food of love. It not just about eating as sustenance, of course; I can do that over my own sink. It’s about enjoying eating as sustenance. Enjoying eating together. Here, taste this. No, this piece is yours. I toasted the pine nuts, just the way you like. (Someone once invited me out for Thai food. What would you like? he asked. “Spicy eggplant?” I suggested. “No,” he said, “I don’t like sauce.” Waiter!) It’s about appetite, in all senses. If you’re like me, you may (perhaps unfairly) border on lactose-intolerant-intolerance. If you’re like me, if you’re without someone to love food with, you get very, very peckish.

So what if you’re an omnivore dating a plainwhitepastavore? A cheesehead crushing on a vegan? Can this marriage of flavors be saved? The New York Times explores that question in today’s “Dining In” section. The answer? Sometimes.

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