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Picky, Picky
The Taquito Moment is the test you didn't know you were giving until the other person failed. Sometimes, it's an impossible test.
"I say, hurl," Wayne advises Garth in "Wayne's World." "If you blow chunks and she comes back, she's yours. But if you spew and she bolts, it was never meant to be."
  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) |
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So here follows, in no particular order, several lifetimes' worth of irritations and perceived warning signs -- a window into the modern limitation of extreme pickiness brought on by too much choice:
Dates with bad grammar. Yankees fans. Actors. Indecisive dates. ("Where do you want to go?" "I dunno, you?") A man who wears a backpack, or socks with his sandals. A woman who can't give good directions to her house. A man who likes pink drinks. A woman who drives a black Pontiac Grand Am with gold rims. A man who kisses you and says, "Yummy!" A woman who wears a tight leopard-print top.
"Any girl that orders a salad as her meal at dinner," says Koonal Gandhi, 27, who shares a place with Joe Peters in upper Northwest Washington. That's an indication she is "very self-conscious about either how she looks or eating in front of other people."
"I do have one guy who I actually stopped dating 'cause he didn't know what paella was," says Jenn Lee, a pediatrician who used to live in New York and now lives in Sterling. The gap in knowledge was a sign to her, she says, "that the guy wasn't cultured. How could you live in New York for 10 years and not experience paella?"
Denisa Canales has had a number of breakups; one because a guy was allergic to her cats, and one because she didn't trust a guy's pit bull. More recently, she left a guy over a crucial difference of opinion concerning her shoes.
They'd been dating for two weeks, and the truth is, things weren't perfect. The guy could be kind of critical, she says, and he seemed to think he knew her better than he did. Anyway, they were out for lunch and she wore the shoes, gold mules with a little heel and lots of beading. She recalls that she'd paid $60 for them and had taken some time picking them out, choosing just exactly what she wanted. The perfect style, The One.
"I call them my pixie shoes," says Canales, 23. "Those shoes exemplify everything that I am. . . . They're so, like, fun and they're kinda dangerous."
She'd worn them to a job interview earlier in the day, and the guy had the audacity to remark that he didn't think they were quite right for an interview. She asked if he liked the shoes and he said in fact, he didn't.
She finished her sushi and stood up.
"Don't call me again," she said, and walked out.
And, as a matter of fact, he never did.
