I love Cary's response to this question, but my own experience with a man who was a domestic slob and an occasional low-level liar showed me that yes, men (and probably women too) are sometimes willing to "clean up" to prove their devotion and secure the love of another, but old habits die REALLY hard. In fact, a motto of mine these days is that life is 90% habit and 10% conscious choice. After the aforementioned boyfriend and I married, he reverted to his old bad habits in no time flat, and despite every effort I could muster (including couples therapy and suggesting he be evaluated for depression) either was incapable of or unwilling to change. After 10 years we finally divorced, and since then he has chosen to live his life like one of those people who turns up in the newspaper for living in unfathomable filth. Oh, yeah, and I can't believe a word that comes out of his mouth, no matter how innocuous. He has lied so long and about so many things that I don't think he would know how to tell it true if he wanted to. I hate to say this to the letter writer, but run now while you still can. Bad hygiene is a total deal-breaker.

b.) there's a point where uber-meta-hipsterism dissolves into garden-variety snark.

Like it's not bad enough that I already get paid less for being a woman, and suffer blonde jokes e-mailed to me by my black stepmother (of all people) ... but now being thin and caucasian is somehow a bad/pathethic thing?

Incidentally, does anyone know how much a Bikram butt like this COSTS?

OK, I've devolved into satire, but the point stands. Luv ya otherwise, Traister, but lay off my skinny white ass. I can only speculate that what this post really represents is misplaced hostility toward "thin blonde pundit" Ann Coulter.

Cary blew it on this one.

Doubt in this situation most assured does mean "don't." Nowhere does the writer state that she loves her boyfriend; only that he loves her. Cary might have had a point if she'd said "I love this man beyond all reason yet I'm balking," but she didn't. She instead calmly listed his and his family's many romantic quirks. There's a reason people have emotions and should listen to them -- because logic isn't always sufficient to determine the truth of a situation.

So when a person start reducing a decision-making process over something this huge to pro/con listmaking and focusing more on the other's feelings than of her own (except to analyze her possible commitmentphobia), it's a huge red flag that something important isn't being acknowledged on an emotional level. And red flags should be clearly acknowledged as red, not some lovely and strangely compelling shade of purple.

It's bad enough that so many people get married hoping they'll fix their partner along the way. Blithely getting married (at the still-tender age of 31) under the assumption that you'll make sense of the relationship itself along the way is nuts.

Agree with the above posters that quoting Amazon.com reviewers is gratuitous and on a site like Salon, cheap.

Dowd's book is a lightning rod for male hostility no matter where it's discussed; the twist here is that much if not most of the commentary I've read on the book appears to have been written by readers who read -- at most -- only the excerpts that appeared in the New York Times Magazine a couple of weekends ago. Otherwise, they might have noticed that:

a.) Dowd frequently writes tongue-in-cheek (may I introduce tongues into this argument?). Any reviewer, on Amazon or elsewhere, should look up "polemic" before writing a single word. And, you know, read the book. How many readers do you even understood that she labeled Hillary Clinton a (possibly unnecessary) "man" in the final chapter? I don't see anyone berating her for going all chauvinist on a feminist icon. Could this have something to do with illustrating the fungibility of gender roles?

b.) Dowd spends very little time on her own dating adventures and I must have missed the part in the book where she allegedly bemoans her lack of a husband. The most "damning" quotes about men are, in fact, made by men, and only in a mostly scientific (but still ironic) context involving the deterioration of the Y chromosome:

Are men necessary? I asked Dr. (Brian) Sykes.

"Clearly not," he replied.

Are men necessary? I asked British geneticist Steve Jones.

"You don't even need the sex slaves," (referring to an earlier quote by Norman Mailer) Dr. Jones assured me. "You just need their cells in a freezer. You'd have to have a very good electricity supply."

Some guys I know have been fretting for years that they may be rendered obsolete if women get biological and financial independence, learning how to reproduce and refinance without them.

Hello? Satire.

c.) Dowd clearly likes men very much. The book's title and subtitle should have been reversed, because "when sexes collide" is a more accurate indicator of its content. Dowd's aim isn't to dis the male race, but to point out the increasingly baffling problem of gender roles and relations. She holds no sacred cows, and all subjects: male, female, liberal, conservative, feminist, religious and so forth -- are open to her critical observation. The book is sloppily edited (I say that as an editor) but its observations (notice I didn't say "conclusions," because she leaves those to the reader) are mostly sound.

If she deflates an ego or two along the way, well, that says far more about the egos involved than about the book.