I'm all for deal-breakers, but was too insecure to use them back in college, which means I ignored the following painfully obvious ones:

1) The guy who slipped his arms around me while I shook a strainer full of pasta over the sink and whispered in my ear: "Hey, that sounds like us having sex!"

2) The guy who jumped out of bed after what might generously be called a quickie to hold up a lighter and do a whispered roar of the crowd noise as though Journey had just launched into "Open Arms."

3) Knit ties.

-- Anonymous

He was cute. Very cute. He made me laugh. He tipped well. He loved movies and music, and admitted to liking the cheesy stuff we all deny. He had great teeth. We talked about everything -- family, travel, careers, college, even bad past dates and, ironically enough, the deal breakers. I was smitten. Then, while he was laughing at one of my more amusing stories, those great teeth of his moved. I was startled and perplexed; I wondered, "Did that really just happen?" No, I assured myself as I took a bite of my crème brûlée. But then it happened again, though more pronounced this time; they slid down just far enough to reveal his empty gums. I stared. He noticed. He explained that he had played hockey in college and had sustained a particularly nasty shot to the mouth, requiring him to get dentures. I feigned sympathy and averted my gaze. The check came. He paid. I tried to envision kissing him. I couldn't. He called. I didn't call back. I'm terrible, I know.

-- Molly R.

My deal breaker occurred about three years ago during a first date with a co-worker I'd had a crush on for a while. She was a tall beautiful African-American woman and I was a lanky tow-headed Caucasian. At the very least, I thought we looked good together -- like a Gap ad or something. Things had been going well. We'd already kissed and that was pretty nice and I was trying to move things forward into full-on make-out abandon. I've found that the best way to do this, especially after a few drinks, is with the right music. In hindsight I now realize that maybe Jeff Buckley's "Grace" -- beautiful, romantic and haunting as it is -- isn't necessarily prime music for sweaty fumblings on my futon (I promise that I've since got a clue and now reach for Peaches or the Faint). Alcohol had loosened her lips in all the wrong ways and after only a few bars of Track 1, she broke a kiss to pull back and say: "What the hell is this shit?" "Well, this is Jeff ... um ... what?" I was speechless. Then I was heartbroken. Then I was angry. Then I asked to take her home. I mean, the man is dead for Chrissake. OK, maybe she didn't know that, but still -- who attacks a clear attempt at setting a mood with such caustic behavior? And on a first date?

-- Will Nepper

I'd been cruising an online personals site for a while, hoping to find somebody in Washington, D.C., who wouldn't ask me whom I worked for two minutes into our first conversation. The usual suspects were there: the naughty but ultimately suburban temptress, the Goth queens, the political whores, the people with five profiles. But one profile caught my eye. We corresponded for a while, and she was engaging and seemed relatively harmless.

We met outside the Dupont Metro and had fairly good chemistry. It seemed obvious to both of us that neither wanted to cut and run at first sight, so dinner was on. We grabbed a bite to eat, and things had that little spark of potential. Few mentions of professional life or politics, compatible taste in music. Slowly but surely, though, various edges of her personality started to show. The naggish: "I thought you said you only smoked occasionally on your profile." While I'm one for down-home honesty, relative level of smoking, is, well relative. "Occasionally" for me can mean "on a first date." I parried with a feeble joke about "supporting my folks at RJR," and lit another cigarette. Though the smoking was a potential deal breaker, the conversation nonetheless remained buoyant.

Still, I caught a whiff of something pretentious about her over the pad Thai, but I hadn't sussed it out yet. It started to make more sense when I saw her reaction to the fact that I had attended a top college: jubilation. Apparently the smoking thing was not the deal breaker it might have been. She responded by saying, "Don't you just hate having to deal with people who went to state schools, or worse, people who lie about what college they went to?" Deal breaker. While the ruthless me wanted to bait her inflated sense of intelligence with a comment about prepositions and sentence structure, the me that was present sputtered, "Some of my best -- and most intelligent -- friends didn't go to college at all ..." And, in a not so freak coincidence, my roommate landed at the airport 10 minutes later and need me to pick him up.

-- E. Miller

The lady who took care of my cat when I went out of town set me up with Trey. He was locally famous, the son of a car dealership owner, and wealthy. I'd seen him on TV -- he was darkly handsome and sort of intellectual looking with these squarish glasses that made him look like an architect, or a scholar, or an architectural scholar. Trey picked me up at work and all was well -- he seemed pleasant, courteous and not obviously dismayed by my appearance. A fairly auspicious start.

We drove to a hip French restaurant he'd chosen, and I didn't have to worry about what to say on the way, because Trey did all the talking. He spotted a skinny blonde on the corner near my place of employment, and asked me, "Do you know her? What's her name?" Then he pulled out a cellphone and started yakking to somebody on the other end named "Alberto." The loud, raucous interchange went on the entire ride. We parked at the restaurant and, at a total loss for a conversation opener, I made some inane remark about the weather. Trey snapped at me, "I think we're beyond small talk, don't you?"

At the restaurant he stared at the waitresses and kept complimenting them on their T-shirts. In the lulls between waitress visits, I asked him what it was like to do commercials on TV.

At the end of the evening he asked me to come over and try out his hot tub. The invitation floored me. He was so rude, I'd thought he'd absolutely hated being with me. Perhaps the restaurant thing had been a test -- if you don't walk out, you're in. But I'd dropped a piece of plywood on my foot earlier in the day -- it was still bleeding, actually, under the Band-Aid -- and I had to beg off. He frowned, figuring I was blowing him off. Which I would have done in any case. He couldn't have peeled out of that parking lot any faster if he'd been on fire. I was so mad at the woman who'd set me up with him that I never spoke to her again. She must have known what he was like, and was probably punishing me for something or other, the way gals will do.

I guess you could call the entire date a deal breaker.

-- Kim

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