How important are a man’s looks to the opposite sex? We will never know for sure, and women will probably never fully know either, because looks are just part of the whole package.

Some women say they are only interested in personality, and do not care at all if you are ugly and fat. If this were completely true, however, they would date exclusively ugly, fat guys because ugly, fat guys are almost always awesome and almost always have the best personalities. Have you ever met an fat and ugly guy that’s just a total asshole? Maybe, but there’s not a whole lot of them. They don’t care about anything and act based on impulses. This is a blanket statement, and, for example, obesity is not just caused by overeating and the result of a lifestyle without limits. I’m just basing this off of the past ten years of my own life when I was a big, huge fat guy. I was great, and if women were only interested in personality, I would have been married exactly six times by now.

Women as a people are not superficial. However, they are people. The same goes for men. Even the best people are genetically inclined to be drawn to attractive people. It’s a combination of primal instinct and a learned mental response due to a lifetime of conceptions and misconceptions about beauty. Nevertheless, we all now have to make ourselves as attractive as possible. Wouldn’t you love to walk into a bar and just see a bunch of fat, happy people all excited to see you and giving you drinks? If you walk into a bar, you will probably instead see a lot of people talking amongst themselves, wearing a lot of product and sweater vests. I actually love sweater vests. It’s all of the horrible ugliness of a sweater combined with the lack of the one redeeming quality of a sweater: warmth. You’ll see a few fat, happy people, but everyone else is trying to ignore and avoid them. Even their friends want them to leave because they think they’re repelling women, when actually the friends themselves are doing this with their sweater vests… and their product… and their penny loafers without socks.

Rule #1 of dating in NYC: Do not take your date to the Village Pourhouse. Do not even give her/him the option of the Village Pourhouse. Don’t even mention that you go to the Village Pourhouse or similar establishments.

This isn’t a difficult thing to avoid. While the Village Pourhouse is best known for a good time (if you can remember it), cheap beers, beer pong, and a young crowd, it’s not known for being a place of romance. That is, unless your idea of romance is making out in a dark corner with a stranger only to ask, “Are you on Facebook?” Now, I’ve never been asked to go to the Village Pourhouse on a first date, or any date for that matter. But my BFF recently went out with a guy whose first option was the Village Pourhouse. She convinced him to go elsewhere, and needless to say, the date sucked before it even began.

I appreciate when guys take into account convenience, noise level, seating (ie. not side-by-side, really that’s just awkward), and menu. You can’t go wrong with a wine or cocktail bar – lots of options and usually a nice, low-key ambiance. I also find it appealing to not have to fear for my life on my way to a date. One guy failed to mention that the bar he picked directly overlooks the East River. This meant I would have to walk across the FDR highway, behind abandoned buildings, decorated with graffiti and broken bottles on the ground. As I walked there, I whispered to myself, “I am not going to die. I am not going to die.” And trust me, if I did die, they would have never found my body.

Honestly, there are so many options in big cities like NYC. And if you can’t think of a place, ask a friend for suggestions. Give your date options so you’re both comfortable. And whatever you do, I beg you: do not make your date fear for their life or even think about the Village Pourhouse. Ever.

What is wrong with going to a bar alone because it makes you happy? Aside from the many things that probably are actually wrong with that, I like doing it.

Whenever I convince a date to go to that horrible bar that I love, I always get there a few hours early. This is not just because I’m obsessively early for everything due to a decade-long superstition about acquiring a fatal hardening-of-the-skin disorder that I once saw in a made-for-TV movie starring Dana Delaney. It’s also because I love going to bars alone.

It’s so great. There’s no pressure to talk to anybody, yet I am welcome to if I want. The bartender knows exactly what I want because she asks me every time, even if my last order was just five minutes ago. Despite the short-term memory of the nice woman whose only job is to have a long-term memory, this is the only place I am truly happy. It’s usually Friday, and I now know why so many people in education are alcoholics. Alcohol can make you feel things that temporarily erase the other bad things you felt earlier in the week.

The one, and very big, drawback to arriving to a date at a bar hours early is that by the time your date arrives, you are already blisteringly drunk. I already talked about this in “Dating Drunk”, but I don’t think I can emphasize enough how big of a deal this is. This could potentially kill a date, or yourself, if you go overboard with the drinking. You will remember the date, but it won’t matter because you will have to go back to your soul-crushing job on Monday.

As mentioned earlier, I decided to try to fulfill my lifelong dream of stand-up comedy last week.  I found a super neat database online that lists all open mic comedy venues in the Houston area.  I called several of the places on the list, but learned the awful truth about the modern transliteration of “open mic.” Open mic, today, almost exclusively pertains to poetry, or to music, which is essentially poetry with a melody.  I stumbled upon this reality quickly.  The first few places that I called either didn’t exist, didn’t host open mic anymore, or did host open mic, but primarily for poetry and/or music only.

The first place I tried was a bar that ironically used to be a comedy club.  Today, it is far less funny and far more of a straightforward bar.  I figured since it was ‘open mic night’ that it would primarily be for amateur comics.  Instead, it was a mix of amateurs and people who really had their junk together.  The host picked the order of the comics randomly, so I had to wait an agonizing three hours before I finally went on and had to follow a gentleman that had been on several television shows.  I stumbled on stage, almost tripping over my profuse, exploding sweat and my failed dreams of fame.  I got through about half of my set before not just completely forgetting my jokes, but also where I was and who all of the people looking at me were.  My friends tell me I ended the set demanding to know where I was.  At least I started strong?

The next bar I tried was a battle for survival.  Though I called beforehand, and the woman whom I talked with was very courteous and informative, the actual place was death.  It was in a bad neighborhood.  There was no sign for the place.  When I walked in, there was really loud music on and I asked to talk to the owner.  When she came not only had she become a man, but she had also become angry, loud, and seemingly homicidal.  I got out of there and was on to my next venue on my road to comic obscurity!

The next place didn’t have a phone number, so I used the address to get there.  Not only was it a grocery store, but it was also a hotel.  Not only was it a hotel, but it was also a bar.  Not only was it a bar, but it was a bar that had never nor will ever host any type of open mic night whatsoever.

Here’s to my meteoric rise to mediocrity.

One of my best friends has been flirting with the idea of joining 100hookup for some time now. Ever since I first joined at the beginning of the summer whenever we hang out he asks me about it and expresses his interest, however, he has been unable to pull the trigger. His procrastination is probably due to the fact that he meets a lot of women, and goes out on dates pretty much every week, so a part of him is probably pretty content with his current dating life.

However, in spite of the volume of women he meets, and number of dates he goes on, I suspect that deep down he knows that 100hookup would be a great resource to him because it would give him the opportunity to meet different types of women that he otherwise would have probably never met. I think that part of the problem that people like my friend run into is that even though they have an active dating life and are meeting a bunch of people every week, they are meeting the same type of person.

For example, if you go to the same bars and hang out with the same people you are going to be limited to a general type of person who enjoys that particular bar and works or hangs out with the people you know. Therefore, while you may not necessarily be limited by the number of people you meet that are potentially datable, you are still keeping yourself from meeting people from other circles. It is a result of this limitation that I believe directly correlates to why my friend’s dates never seem to turn into relationships because ultimately he is just replicating the same dating situation over and over with the same type of girl.

This is why I believe that the online dating community would open up his dating world to women that he would have otherwise never met, since unlike his usual bars, 100hookup is populated by people of all different personalities, backgrounds and ideologies. You see, my friend has inadvertently put himself in a box, like so many of us have during our dating careers.  That’s fine for a time, but whether it be with the people you are meeting in bars, or those you are trying to start conversations with online, sometimes you have to go outside your box and shake things up a little bit, which in the example of my friend, would be joining the online community and having the chance to meet all different types of interesting women.