This makes me want to barf, on so many levels:
Martha Flach mentioned meat twice in her Match.com profile: “I love architecture, The New Yorker, dogs … steak for two and the Sunday puzzle.”
She was seeking, she added, “a smart, funny, kind man who owns a suit (but isn’t one) … and loves red wine and a big steak.”
The repetition worked. On her first date with Austin Wilkie, they ate steak frites. A year later, after burgers at the Corner Bistro in Greenwich Village, he proposed. This March, the rehearsal dinner was at Keens Steakhouse on West 36th Street, and the wedding menu included mini-cheeseburgers and more steak.
Ms. Wilkie was a vegetarian in her teens, and even wore a “Meat Is Murder” T-shirt. But by her 30s, she had started eating cow. By the time she placed the personal ad, she had come to realize that ordering steak on a first date had the potential to sate appetites not only of the stomach but of the heart.
Girls, remember when you had to pick daintily at your salad on the first date? Well, those days are no more. Salads seem “wimpy, insipid, childish,” and if you order one, you’ll be considered “vapid and uninteresting.” Men these days want women who want steak. Big, nasty, bleeding steak. “Meat is strategy” in the dating scene, and ordering a nice fat steak on your first date lets suitors know that you are “unpretentious and down to earth and unneurotic,” and that you’re “not obsessed” with weight and you “don’t have any food issues.” Which is so much easier than, you know, actually having to express that with a personality or something.
Never mind the reasons one might have for eschewing flesh, we women better get on board the meat express if we want to bring home a man. Because what we eat, like every other major life decision, should be based on what the opposite sex will think about it. Thank you, New York Times, for letting me know that perhaps what my life is lacking is a meat-centered romance, one where I can “be myself” by eating hunks of dead animal.
Or maybe I could just eat WTF I feel like eating.
