Booty food: Any food that causes weak knees, accelerated heart beat, tingly body parts; associated with falling in love.

I was excited at the prospect of a meal with all aphrodisiac ingredients, but at first I thought the non-Jews were going to have all the fun. The "booty food" on the menu wasn't very kosher: bacon-wrapped sea scallops, for example, and grilled pork chop with port-infused fig sauce and polenta.

Technology can be a useful tool in the dating world. It can help you meet, flirt and even break up.

It also can make you -- meaning me -- look like an absolute idiot.

There's a woman I've been dating recently. Let's call her Mary. Two years ago, while living in New York City, I dated someone else for about three months. Let's call her Mary, too.

We hadn't been there for five minutes and already Dave was looking for a contingency plan.

Sometimes singles events are brilliantly conceived ideas that fail to materialize. Sometimes they are poor ideas that end up working out well.

Sometimes, they are awful ideas that end up giving even the word "awful" a bad name.

Dinner is great. A movie? Fine. Flowers? Whatever.

But sometimes, this doesn't cut it. Sometimes, you have to blow your date out of the water. Sometimes, you have to leave her jaw on the ground at the end of the night.

It's called shock value. It worked for Janet Jackson's career after Justin Timberlake exposed her at the Super Bowl. It had to work for me.

It's time for singles to reclaim Feb. 14 and feel good about their lives

Hallmark calls it Valentine's Day. Single people call it hell.

Well, brothers and sisters, I'm here to liberate you. You no longer need to care about Valentine's Day.

In fact, you should rail against the insidious holiday, and call it what it is -- a day invented by ruthless corporations to shamelessly capitalize on deep-seated fears of, and desires for, love.

It wasn't a date, but I wish it had been.

The first indication that it wasn't a date was the fact that I didn't even ask her out directly-I had to go through a publicist. The second clue was that although I asked the publicist for dinner, I was downgraded to coffee.

But it didn't matter. I can do the coffee date.

The following is for men's eyes only, unless there are women out there who want to see grown men get scolded in newsprint:

So I go to these dating events.

I've gone to 8Minute Dating and Flash Dating and Turbo Dating, all variations on the speed dating theme of having a lot of short conversations with a lot of women of the same age in just one night.

The last time I did this, my hands were clammy, but I grabbed my girlfriend's hand anyway.

To avoid the palpable discomfort, I started skipping. Then I started singing: "We're going to get our AIDS test results! We're going to get our AIDS test results!'

She sang along with me and some of our discomfort eased. Of course, this was serious. We were, in fact, going to get results for HIV/AIDS.

In the first hour of a typical first date, you find out about siblings, jobs and roommates.

 
On a recent first date, I was left clueless about all of that. But I did find out my date's Venus was on my ascendant. And that was before we even had our first cocktail.

We are different creatures. We have different habits when speaking, sleeping and feeling, ingrained since the beginning of mankind.

Why does he do what he does? Because he's a caveman.

Why does she do what she does? Because she's a gatherer.