Lemondrop

I have no game and, if I really like someone, am likely to embarrass us both. It's an unfortunate form of dating Tourette's.

Any grocery store magazine rack has seven trillion solutions for me: Yogalates! Red veggies! Zen meditation in front of an altar displaying a life-size cardboard cutout of Oprah! Worthy suggestions, but if I wait to become perfect before searching for a boyfriend, I'm going to be single for a very long time.

Finding someone who melds with my own specific quirks (read: can put up with me) means really looking -- rather than waiting for convenient cinematic serendipity. And that equals a lot of first dates.

After wasting precious years of my fleeting youth, I whittled time spent down to a month. Then I honed it to two dates. Now I can tell within 15 minutes of meeting someone.

Click here to read Amber's list of ways to tell if it's love (or at least lust) ...

Clues Denoting Interest:

1. I find myself smiling more than normal, and I'm very proud to have remembered lip gloss.

2. I spend the day after a date plotting subtle -- or not-so-subtle -- ways of luring him to my apartment.

3. Keen desire to scrub my baseboards in anticipation of such event.

4. Attempt to casually snap a picture to e-mail all my friends. (Hint: Don't do this. It never comes off as casually as you hope.)

5. Temptation to pluck things I normally forget to pluck for months at a time. (Yeah, my eyebrows won't win any grooming awards. I believe the term is "Muppet-like.")

This list may speak more to Lust than Everlasting Love, but I find lust is a reasonable place to start, assuming sufficient recon has been done. Either I'm naïve, omniscient, or far luckier than I deserve, but I've found that I can generally determine intelligence, humor and kindness (to relatives/animals/waitstaff, etc.) by the end of a 20-minute conversation.

But it takes the full day after to determine how badly I want to scrub my shower tiles, just in case he should happen to see them.