Halt! Don't Go There!: Places Where You Should *Never* Look for Dates

Your fellow tenant in the place where you live.

Sure, it's convenient at first, a love affair with the hottie on the first floor ... but once it goes down the tubes, it's can be kind of awkward, as it was for my old buddy Henry. He lived above the girl he was sleeping with for a few months. After they broke up, there were a few times when she called him, saying "I can hear you up there--who are f**king? WHO IS SHE?" Scary. He was getting ready to find a new place, cheap rent be damned, when the girl rang up to report (in tears) that she was moving out, because she couldn't take it any more.



Your dentist.

Little-known fact: Dentists are party animals. A crazy friend of mine, Cassie, once dated her dentist, and they'd go out clubbing every night and snort a bunch of coke, and he bought her a diamond bracelet for their, like, one-week anniversary--and then went totally psycho on her when she tried to break it off! Wouldn't stop calling, showed up in the middle of the night banging on her door--and then she even heard from the crazy dentist's wife! (She hadn't known he was married!) ... Having heard this insane story, I declined when my own (quite adorable) dentist asked me out on a date two years ago. But the whole thing was so awkward that I haven't been able to call him for an appointment since. And my teeth are rotting! Let this be a cautionary tale to you wild kids out there: Dating the wrong kind of men (i.e. dentists!) can really put your dental hygiene at great risk.



Your shrink.

The evil stepmother of a friend of mine recently broke up with her husband--my friend's father--so she could start dating her shrink. What makes this whole story even more wrong is that she herself is an psychoanalyst! So people, Prince of Tides nonwithstanding, please don't pull your therapist onto the couch with you. It's bad news when the person who is supposed to help you figure out all your psychodrama becomes the person who is creating it.



Your office-mate.

My father likes to say: Don't piss where you eat. Similarly: Don't screw where you toil. In other words: Please think carefully before you let your office-mate dip his pen in your ink well. He is someone you will have to see every single day, after all, and behave professionally in front of from 9-to-5. If you're convinced you're in love and you two will go the distance, that's one thing. (And I still might hold off till one of you get transferred to a different department.) But going out to, say, the Corner Bistro, after work, getting wasted on shots to celebrate the end of a tough week, and then taking your co-worker home with you ... ? Probably a terrible idea. Probably not worth the potential awkwardness. (Then again, my crazy friend Cassie dated someone she used to work, and that didn't go so badly--perhaps because she got fired about two weeks after the affair started so they were free to continue their romancing without the pressures of the work-place. And you know what she and her beau did on her last day of work? They stayed later than everyone else--and then they had sex on her boss's desk! I kid you not.)