1. There are plenty of fish in the sea:
This is almost true. There are plenty of fish in the sea. Unfortunately, by the time you pass age 30 most of them have been thrown back by other people. If they're not caviar, they're cat food.
(Note: people in relationships use this adage to reassure those who are not. The only response is to hope their relationships break up calamitously. Ha! See how bloody reassuring they find it then.)
2. It is better to be single and lonely than attached and discontent: It is better to be attached, discontent and having regular sex than to be single and having no sex at all.
3. Teenagers now are different from the way we used to be:
In truth, the blokes still look the same - pimply, slightly funny-smelling, dressed like unemployed footballers - but the girls now dress like little supermodels. When I was a teenager, girls wore baggy jeans and shapeless sweaters. For the first 17 years of my life, I thought Irish girls didn't develop breasts until they married. I assumed it was something in the water.
Furthermore, they were the kinds of girls who listened to The Cure and The Smiths, music to get killed, not kissed, by. (I knew one girl who had only one record in her collection: Hatful of Hollow by The Smiths, a record so relentlessly miserable that turning it off was the audio equivalent of a mercy killing.)
Actually, I wouldn't have known what to say to a girl dressed in black mini-skirt, a vest and high heels when I was a teenager. Mind you, I'm rapidly approaching the age when I know exactly what I'll say to her, and it'll start with "No daughter of mine is going out dressed like a streetwalker . . ."
4. Men are afraid of commitment:
Men are afraid of everything. They are afraid of rejection, of acceptance, of their girlfriends, of their girlfriends' parents, of their girlfriends' friends. In relationship terms, men live in a constant state of barely-controlled terror. This exhibits itself in peculiar ways, such as phonophobia (fear of using a telephone to call a girl whose number you've taken and who you've promised - promised - to call on Monday) and definophobia (fear of making a commitment to be somewhere with a partner even a couple of days down the line in case something - anything - more important comes up).
Anyway, men wouldn't be so afraid of commitment if women didn't keep bringing it up.
5. Irish men are not romantic: The average Irish guy's idea of romance on Valentine's Day is to buy dying flowers in a petrol station and to make sure the chocolates aren't out of date (or, if they are, to remove the label saying so).
Sadly, we live in a pub culture and pubs, due to their group nature, are not romantic. The only people who begin life-long love affairs in pubs are alcoholics.
In addition, most men - and many women - still exist at the kebab-and-chips level of social dining, so restaurant/cafe society is not an option. In romantic dining terms, we still drag our knuckles on the ground and eat raw.
In New York, art galleries open late on certain evenings so single people can meet over fine art. In Ireland, galleries and museums are usually closed by the time most people finish work and, anyway, who in their right minds would go to an art gallery instead of a pub? I mean, be realistic.
6. There is someone for everyone.
This is true: when I was in school her name was Lisa and the going rate was a Mars bar.
7. There is somebody for everybody, Part II:
Again, this is something attached people say to be reassuring. In fact, there are some poor bastards who are destined to die lonely. This is because they are desperate, inadequate and sexually abnormal, with low self-esteem, a tendency to self-pity and a couple of bad relationships behind them. Unfortunately, they don't hide it as well as the rest of us.
8. Men feel break-ups as intensely as women:
In general, men tend to talk less than women about their feelings of hurt and rejection, which is a good thing because it's weak and shameful and nobody likes a misery guts.
Some men deal with break-ups by getting back in the saddle and trying again. Other men mope and try to brighten up their lonely existences by buying potted plants.
This is based on the mistaken belief that someone who killed a relationship by refusing to commit to a movie date can keep a complex biological organism alive.
9. Single people have more fun:
In reality, dating is hard, disappointing and frequently frustrating. At best, it's a series of empty, meaningless sexual encounters - which is still pretty good, but won't make you happy in the long term. No, honestly.
In addition, married men live longer and always have someone on hand to tell them how wonderful they are. Women, meanwhile, suffer from stress and depression, watch their husbands grow fat and contented in front of Match of the Day, and end up as widows. So, a good deal all round.
10. The whole dating scene isn't worth it - there's no such thing as eternal love.
As Woody Allen put it, the heart is a very resilient little muscle. It breaks, it heals, it breaks again, but disappointments in love rarely kill it; only eating chocolate and cream cakes can do that (although these are, admittedly, side-effects of disappointment in love). To quote Allen again, in love, as in all things, 70 per cent of success is showing up (and if all else fails, you can always marry your stepdaughter). Love exists, but you have to be out there to find it.
Just don't come running to me when it all falls apart.