Dear Amritsar,
The other night I had a date with a smoking hot woman, Beverly Bitmap. I am not exaggerating, either: the fire department checked in with her every hour just to be sure she hadn't set any buildings on fire. Trying to impress her, I took Bev (she asked me call her that...well, that was the compromise we came up with, anyway) to Stubby's Stabby Steakery, a British/Somali fusion restaurant.
We ordered drinks and Bev excused herself and went to the bathroom. Then, we ordered dinner and Bev went to the bathroom again. After the drinks arrived, she went to the bathroom once more. Then, again, after her first bite of soup. Bev went to the bathroom four times during the actual meal (salad, steak, steak after it was sent back to be cooked a little more, steak after it had returned from being cooked a little more), then, again, after ordering dessert, then twice more while we were having dessert (once after she sent the chocolate mousse back to be cooked a little more and once after the chocolate mousse had returned from being cooked a little more). She is currently in the bathroom as I write this while waiting for the bill.
I may not know a lot about women, but even I can see a pattern emerging.
Should I assume that Bev has been going to the bathroom so often because she is checking her email, or should I just accept that she has an exceptionally weak bladder?
Baruch BoitanoHey, Babe,
Women go to the bathroom for a variety of reasons. Sure, sometimes they check their email. Others times, they play a couple levels of Bejeweled. Other other times, they update their Farcebook pages. Sometimes they tweet about the terrible conversation you are making (HINT: talking about the infighting among the members of your pet rock collection isn't going to stoke anybody's ardour flames). Once in a while, they listen to the latest Autotunes song on YahooTube. Once in an even longer while, they check their calendar to see if they haven't mistaken the date with you for an appointment with their dentist.
Sometimes, and I know this may be hard to believe but you're just going to have to trust me on this one, women go to the bathroom because they have to pee.
Given all of these possibilities, I can understand why you might have difficulty knowing what your date is up to. I would suggest that you honestly assess whether your dinner conversation is so dull it would freeze Husain Bolt in mid-sprint. Unfortunately, most of us are not very good at assessing the quality of our dinner conversation; fortunately, there's an app for that.
Date Deathwatch ($3.97 from The Apple Schnorrer) is simple: enter the age of your date, the place where you expect to have the conversation and the topic you would like to discuss. DD compares these inputs to its database and returns an assessment of your choice of conversation on a scale of one ("Spring for some champagne, Casanova!") to 17 ("Is your insurance paid up? Because you'll be lucky if your date doesn't try to strangle you with your own tie before the night is over!")
Date Deathwatch can give you a big clue to what your date is doing in the bathroom, but it can't tell you for certain. For that, you would need the Toilet Treachery Tracker app ($3,970,003.97 from the Department of Defence Store). Simply enter the name of the establishment in which you are dining: T3 uses the latest thermal imaging technologies to determine how many women are in the bathroom, then employs the latest signal capture and filtering algorithms to determine what, if any, electronic communications your date is engaging in. Owing to outdated concepts of privacy (and the laws that enable them), the T3 app will only give you the name of the programme the woman is using, not the actual content; but there are third party add-ons (ie: Date Spy, Date Stalker and Ultimate Date Creepiness) that can fill in this gap.
But, honestly, if your date wants to get away from you so badly that she spends more time in the bathroom than at the table, what else do you really need to know?
Send your relationship problems to the Alternate Reality News Service's sex, love and technology columnist at questions@lespagesauxfolles.ca. Amritsar Al-Falloudjianapour is not a trained therapist, but she does know a lot of stuff. AMRITSAR SAYS: love hurts. To be on the safe side, get robopocalypse insurance.