Here is my list of five things I've found in men's refrigerators that made me not want to date them. It ain't easy having standards.
5. Bad beer, and even worse condiments. The running joke is that bachelors have nothing but beer and condiments in their refrigerators. With a few exceptions, I have noticed this to be the absolute truth. Cases of Fat Tire and bottles of hot sauce, cans of Guinness and squeezy bottles of mayonnaise -- no actual food or ingredients to make meals, just barbeque and ketchup to adorn fast food and takeout, and beer to swill when the mood strikes.But I'm willing to forgive a lot if the guy has good beer and good condiments. If I want to date a guy instead of simply using him for a night's entertainment, I want to see things like Sriracha, Ponzu sauce, horseradish, lemon juice and jars of minced garlic in addition to quality mustard. And beers actually worth drinking, like anything from Blue Moon Brewing Co. Why is this important? Because a guy with no imagination is as boring as ketchup, and as easy to find as Bud Light bottles.
4. A rot mess.
Everyone has leftovers in their fridges from time to time, but if you let them turn into mossy, furry, noxious piles of spore-infested slop, then what does it say about your overall state of cleanliness? I've found a strong correlation between guys who have bowls of moldy food in their refrigerators and guys who can't be bothered to clean their living spaces or wash/groom themselves properly.
If a male knows a female is coming to his house and doesn't have the foresight and good sense to clean the old, nasty crap outta the fridge, then obviously he isn't one to try very hard at anything -- and being filthy and lazy are not qualities I look for in a partner.
3. A vast emptiness of nothing. I was invited to a guy's apartment once for dinner, and quickly discovered that to him, dinner meant a finger, a phone and a pizza. I peered into his fridge and found...absolutely nothing. No food, no drink, no after-sex stash of pudding cups....not even so much as a box of baking soda, much less beer and condiments.
How were we going to fuel up before, during and after a night of sexy, sexy sex with no supplies? I wondered if this was really his apartment. I wondered if he relied on his mother to stock him up once a month. I wondered what the hell I was doing with a guy who did not know how to visit a grocery store.
I left, and continued my search for a better, smarter man -- one with nookie-snacks.
2. The best of the best.
Show me a man with a refrigerator full of truffle butter, oil-cured olives, handmade pasta and Blood Orange San Pellegrino, and I'll show you a man who has only a tepid interest in the company of women -- if any interest at all. I adore gay men -- I can sit with them in their stylishly decorated condos, we can discuss the comparative merits of black teas and green teas, and we can shop at the farmers' markets together for fresh asparagus and local honey. But, unfortunately for me, the one thing we can't really do is date.
1. Canned mushrooms.
There are some foods I find so abhorrent that no amount of rationalization can make me want to date a guy who has them. Pre-shredded cheese (covered with that gunky powder and sour taste), tubs of margarine, S'mores Pop Tarts, A-1 Sauce and, above all else: canned mushrooms.
Pre-packaged shredded cheese is just lazy, margarine causes impotence (at least that's what I've heard), S'mores is the worst flavor of Pop-Tarts, A-1 steak sauce just shows that the guy can't properly cook a steak -- or pay someone else to do it. But button mushrooms in a can (I give exception to exotics like straw mushrooms, because they can be hard to come by) is the foulest, filthiest, most disgusting food known to the human race and anyone who uses this product lacks both wisdom and common sense, because fresh mushrooms are inexpensive, easy to find and superior to canned ones in every way.
Normally cans of mushrooms aren't found in refrigerators, anyway, so imagine my surprise when I was invited back to this hawtie guy's place after a beautiful date, and when I was raiding his fridge for a drink after some seriously fine make-out action I saw, right there on the middle shelf, an open can of mushrooms with the lid bent back over the top.
Not only did this guy use canned shrooms, he didn't even have the basic knowledge of food safety to take them out of the open can, instead leaving them in his fridge to marinate in salt water...and potential pathogens. It was a real pity -- I really liked this guy, but there are just some foods that I can't stomach.
