"Let's face it. Women are complicated creatures and at times hard to understand. But the reality is, there's an unspoken list of things men say, wear, or do that will pretty much guarantee that the girl you just took out to dinner won't ever want to see you again," the authors write. "Or if she does, it will be to tell you that she 'just wants to be friends'." (Sound familiar?)
They say the visual clues and "undateable behaviour" includes things such as high-waisted "dad jeans", (reminiscent of Seinfeld), mandannas, (bandannas on men), owning a bong (if they're over 30), wearing tube socks with sandals (enough said) and sporting anything that says "Ed Hardy" on the front. Other deal breakers include if he carries a "murse" (man purse), adjusts his crotch in public (do any men not do that?), shaves his chest (are men really meant to wax?) or wears hair plugs.
While it all seems a little superficial to me, my serially single girlfriend maintains that, when it comes to visual deal breakers, every girl has a different level of what they will and won't accept.
She tells me the story of the time she walked into a potential boyfriend's house and in his bathroom she found two things that caused her to leave immediately: an at-home hair highlighting kit and an unflushed toilet ... with a something unsightly still floating in it.
"At first I was turned off by the highlighting kit, and then I lifted the toilet seat and I just had to get out of there," she recalls. "Even though he was quite handsome. It was a pity."
While others might say that there's nothing wrong with a little light guy-lighting (men who highlight their hair), that everyone forgets to flush once in a while and that women like my girlfriend are simply being "too picky", I decided to scan the opinion of bestselling author Lana Penrose to see if my friend (and the authors of Undateable) were being too harsh on the poor blokes.
In Penrose's latest book Kickstart My Heart: A Carnival of Dating Disasters, she talks about a slew of deal-breaking experiences ...
"If you're on a date with a man who miraculously produces a pair of tailor-made fangs and proclaims he's a vampire (as has happened to me - for real), I'd be tempted to walk, but not always. I absolutely draw the line if a crack pipe falls from his pocket (as has happened to me also)."
While these days she has a better eye for spotting an "undateable", she says it was mightily difficult learning to stop the cycle of dating one undateable after another.
"I've devoted the last two years to getting to the bottom of it. I made a firm decision that I would not go through the rest of my life falling in and out of stupid relationships. A lot of what I've learnt came courtesy of a beautiful cognitive behavioural therapist. I've also undertaken a host of other practical measures, including NLP, meditation, eye movement desensitisation reprocessing and visiting witches and healers. I've left nothing to chance!"
Unfortunately for many women who find themselves continually falling into the pattern of dating the undateable, perhaps taking drastic measures is the only way to break the habit.
Or if the Undateable book is anything to go by, then you can save yourself a heck of a lot of dough and simply look at the type of jeans he's wearing to know instantly whether or not he's the one ...
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