Picky, Picky

Must love cats: Denisa Canales, 23, broke it off with one boyfriend because he was allergic to her cats. (By Linda Davidson -- The Washington Post)

He chooses one despite himself -- jalapeno and cream cheese, if memory serves. He takes a few bites and throws the thing away in disgust. She devours hers with evident relish.

This was the beginning (and the beginning of the end) of Peters's brief romance with a woman who "just liked the worst food in the world." Then Peters, a program analyst for the federal government, took her out to dinner, and that's when things really deteriorated. She started talking about mayonnaise.

"Some people are mayonnaise people, I completely understand it. But I. Hate. Mayonnaise," Peters says. He thinks it's a texture thing. "I just find it to be the most repulsive thing in the world. And she's just going on and on about how great mayonnaise is and how you can eat all these things and my stomach is just curdling."

There was one more incident. They went to grab a quick bite and she got a roast beef and brie sandwich, heated up. The brie was "oozing."

"I mean, when it's hot and running all over, it looked terrible, and in light of the taquito and mayonnaise stories, I was just like, I can't take it anymore," Peters says.

He stopped calling her. He knows this sounds really bad.

"Feel free to put in there what a shallow [bleep] I am," he says.

But is it really so shallow? Or is it merely efficient, given all the available women in the world Peters might have to date to find someone perfect? It's like shoe shopping; you can't buy the first pair you try on.

Besides, when you push Peters, you discover there was something else about the girl, something too "small-town," too "old-fashioned and motherlike" for him. You start to wonder if the taquito-and-mayonnaise-and-brie thing is just a convenient explanation for something too subtle for words.

After all, Peters is perfectly willing to accept certain imperfections.

"My ex-girlfriend loved Celine Dion," he says.

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