Next Applicant, Please

Wendy Walsh had been at home breast-feeding for two years by the time her grand opus, The Boyfriend Test: How to Evaluate His Potential Before You Lose Your Heart, was published. “It’s really just a look back, a reflection on my single life,” she says contentedly, having reached a state of happy domestic cohabitation. “They say hindsight is 20/20.”

Walsh wants to use what she’s learned to halt bad relationships in their tracks. First, she warns readers, “Stop falling in love with men’s potential; potential can’t love you back.” Here she pauses, knowing that her insightful theory strikes a chord. The point, as she sees it, is not to save doomed relationships but to understand why people are in doomed relationships in the first place.

Walsh’s “sisters in the trenches of love wars” are quite numerous. She’s touring the United States and has already made her way to TV shows and best-seller lists. With a spotlight focused on her past, Walsh has found that she’s not the only one with a history of dating “bad boys.” For women with this unfortunate tendency, Walsh shares easy-to-remember catchphrases this Friday at Unity Temple on the Plaza.

Before applying The Boyfriend Test, a reader must want a boyfriend. In “Men Are Like Pizza,” Walsh compares this kind of self-knowledge to a growling stomach, which is like a “vision of domestic bliss.” (Walsh doesn’t explain how she knows our growling stomachs mean we want pizza and not enchiladas, or how she knows those visions of domestic bliss won’t be better satisfied by a puppy.)

When a reader has decided she’s ready, she creates a candidate profile. Does she want a boyfriend who wears clothes from the Gap, or does she want him to wear more “academic” attire? By asking such probing questions before actual human beings (and the emotions they inspire) come into play, boyfriend seekers can start looking for the ideal man and stop falling for real ones. Walsh urges readers not to be hasty in completing the profile, reminding boyfriend-hungry women that when God created the earth, “she took an entire week.” Once the personality profile is complete, readers move on to The Boyfriend Test: a series of questions that Walsh recommends asking (though not necessarily out loud) of potential candidates.

This assumes that the interviewer has interested applicants. But Walsh doesn’t worry about that. “Men are gonna like whatever we have to bring, as long as it runs on estrogen,” she explains. “They have all these sperm trying to get in, and we just have one giant ovum waiting to take applications.” Having elucidated this perspective on physiology, she wonders, “What are we going to the beauty parlor for, anyway?”

We’re going to the beauty parlor in case Wendy’s wrong.