How to Be a Serial Monogamist

Excerpted from
Do You Love Me or Am I Just Paranoid? : The Serial Monogamist's Guide to Love
By Carina Chocano

The best way to keep the boyfriends coming is to be devastatingly beautiful. If this is not within your budget, it is advisable to develop an attractive personality. While most people will agree on what makes a person devastatingly beautiful, many find it harder to reach a consensus about what makes for an attractive personality. These days, it's even harder to ascertain whether someone has a nice personality, or whether his or her doctor has achieved the perfect psychotropic cocktail. Don't be alarmed if you become involved with someone whose doctor is still experimenting.

Which leads to the good news: Thanks to the widespread availability of personality-enhancing chemicals and the vast army of personal gurus at our disposal, our personalities are changeable as the wind, maybe even more so. This is never more true than at the beginning of a new relationship.

Starting a relationship is a little like starting at a new school-nobody knows you were a social pariah known only as "Stinky Lip," and, more important, nobody has to know. As far as your new potential boyfriend goes, your class picture was never pasted to the urinal in the boys' bathroom, and you never spent any significant amount of time in the Dumpster behind the gym. It is permissible to eventually reveal the sordid details of your past, but only after your boyfriend has made it his personal mission to save you from yourself.

The realization that it is possible to reinvent oneself from scratch at the start of a new affair can be a heady one, and many ambitious young lovers find they don't know just where to begin. Follow these basic approaches to get started:

1. Adaptive

The adaptive monogamist tailors her personality to the tastes of the person she is currently seeing. This is an evolutionary trait that has aided countless invertebrate species in the art of continued survival. Before approaching her target, the adaptive monogamist makes a careful study of his behaviors, preferences, beliefs, and habits. She then methodically alters her own to suit, taking great care to simulate a long-term interest and devotion to his hobbies and personal causes. Should the monogamist's efforts to transform herself into the woman of her love-object's dreams be discovered by friends, roommates, or family members, she should claim total ignorance regarding the matter. It is perfectly admissible to completely alter one's musical tastes, for example, as long as one is steadfast in denying that such a transformation is taking place. While some may find this sort of behavior distasteful and dishonest, it should be pointed out that the adaptive monogamist's old behaviors, etc., are actually those of her ex-boyfriend. In other words, she is not really changing into someone else. She is simply molting.

2. Passive-Aggressive

The passive-aggressive monogamist knows that nothing attracts a boyfriend like dysfunction, and therefore seeks to highlight her own shortcomings in an attempt to pass them off as a sort of fascinating complexity. Blindsided by her rampant displays of selfishness/bitchiness/immaturity, the new boyfriend will find himself strangely compelled to fix her problems. Depending on the complexity and depth of these problems, they should keep the relationship fueled for anywhere from one to three years, after which point the passive-aggressive monogamist will herself come to be viewed as the problem.

3. Reactive

The reactive monogamist knows exactly what she wants in a boyfriend: the exact opposite of her last boyfriend. Unfortunately, this often means trading good qualities for bad ones, then doing it again, then again. Eventually, chances are good that the reactive monogamist will come full circle, become very dizzy, and have to sit down.

3. Reactive

The reactive monogamist knows exactly what she wants in a boyfriend: the exact opposite of her last boyfriend. Unfortunately, this often means trading good qualities for bad ones, then doing it again, then again. Eventually, chances are good that the reactive monogamist will come full circle, become very dizzy, and have to sit down.

4. Sarcastic

The sarcastic monogamist knows how to charm the pants right off prospective boyfriends by passing her bad attitude off as a withering sense of humor. Once pants have been re-moved, however, this approach loses effectiveness. It is the rare naked person who appreciates the fruits of a caustic wit.