MEN ARE WHY WOMEN ARE SINGLE.

Byline: GAIL TZIPPORAH SAUNDERS

Local View

FOR the past few weeks, I have wanted to discover a secret of the universe in order to win some sort of a prize, have my own reality show or at the very least obtain a gift certificate to a home-improvement store.

And now I think I have latched onto something, too, by discovering why so many women are single.

It started out with a simple conversation with my carpet cleaner, who not only knows his synthetics and his blends, but is also versed in affairs of the heart.

"I know this woman who is single again," he said during a recent phone interview, "and she was dating this guy, but he didn't want to marry her unless he was sure they were sexually compatible, so he suggested that they live together. Then he would decide."

A whole slew of sayings coursed through my brain from "P.T. Barnum was right, honey" to "Hindsight is 20-20," but I said nothing.

Which brings me to Rule One in the Ten Commandments of Relationships: Thou shalt set normal, reasonable limits so that the other person shalt not take advantage of the situation and turn rude.

Had it been me, we would have had the following conversation while I ordered the most expensive item from the plastic menu pinned to the wall.

He: I hate being bored, so I want to test you out to see if we are sexually compatible. Then I will fill in my proxy by mail.

Me: Let me put it to you like this. (Singing) "I am woman, hear me roar in numbers too big to ignore, and I know too much to go back and pretend, 'cause I'm still an embryo with a long, long way to go ..."

It just might have marked the end of the relationship or the end of the line in the restaurant, but who cares?

Part of the problem is not only that woman who surely acted out of desperation, but it is that some men have regressed to their Neanderthal state, and we women are partially to blame for allowing it to happen.

During a recent phone conversation with a Neanderthal I had just met, I commented that I own and operate my own power drill with bits and all, and his comment was something that can't be repeated in front of polite company.

In one week alone, I have been honked at while walking down the street while wearing oversized glow-in-the-dark tennis shoes with paint on them, asked if I wanted a ride from a man with one bad eye in a pickup truck, and survived an attempted groping by a married co-worker with hair growing out of his ears.

Not that any of us would expect a man extending his pinkie in the air while saying something very British, though it would be nice, but it doesn't have to be the Cromagnum Man, either.

Somewhere there has got to be a happy medium or a training ground where we could churn out versions of Cary Grant, Clark Gable and Fred Astaire, not Billy Bob with teeth the color of stale beer riding by in a pickup truck.

In these days of a skittish stock market, I am going to find a Lovey Howell type or maybe a New York socialite to open a charm school where the men would learn to plie, walk with books balanced atop their heads, waltz and clearly annunciate "The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain." I am sure that its stock would surge about as soon as it hit Wall Street.