As a bartender, I am no stranger to giving advice. At last count there were at least eight weddings, three divorces, two children born out of wedlock, five children born in wedlock and four very happy same-sex marriages as a direct result of advice from yours truly.
So when I saw eHarmony's article this week on reasons to date a bartender, I was, of course, delighted, but felt someone owed it to the world to balance out this sage advice from a website that results in 5 percent of all marriages in a country with the world's highest divorce rate.
So here we go.
15 Reasons NOT to date a bartender
1: You will not see them. When you do they will look like they are a) hungover and b) exhausted. This is because they are a) hungover and b) exhausted.
2: Whenever you visit a bar together, no matter how stunning you look, their first glance will always be at the spirit selection. If the bar has a poor spirit selection, they will be depressed and listless for the rest of your evening.
3: Unless you are willing to learn something about aged rum and the subtle nuances of various bitters, they will resent you.
4: No matter how super-smart they actually are, all your friends will think they have less than three GCSE's to their name and almost certainly in humanities subjects like drama and home economics.
5: Other women will hit on them and they will reciprocate under the guise that all bartenders need to be "professionally single."
6: On a sunny day, when you wish to frolic in the park, they will be hidden in a sweaty pit of duvet moaning in pain at the sunshine creeping through the window like the vampires of old.
7: Face facts, your mother is not going to be pleased.
8: Every holiday you take together will have a hidden alcohol theme. You may visit Cuba (Havana Club), Guatemala (Ron Zacapa), and France (Hennessy Silver Jubilee 1977) but you will never visit Egypt, (makes nothing) Cambodia (less than nothing), and Puerto Rico (Bacardi).
9: You will have at least six conversations a day about how c**p the tips are. Then you will eat out and they will leave a c**p tip because their tips are c**p. (This may be deemed controversial in the USA where you get on average a dollar a drink; however in the UK, Australia and New Zealand you get on average a dollar a fortnight divided between eight of you with a discretionary percentage to the kitchen, so I'm sticking with it.)
10: In fashion, both on shift and off, they will lean toward wearing more black than Johnny Cash at the height of his career (1960-1963) and only marginally less than a Hasidic Rabbi.
11: Their natural musk will be the faintly perceptible smell of Jagermeister.
12: Years of inbuilt cynicism from dealing with the general public means they will believe in no faith, creed or deity but will fly into an uncontrolled state of rapture at the mention of the name Dale Degroff.
13: Their sexual performance will be limited by a bad back caused by years of picking up heavy objects with poor lifting technique. Plus who knows what effect years of living off pizza, KFC, the bar's complimentary peanuts and dubiously coloured staff meals has had on their sperm count.
14: Your chances of getting on the property ladder are slim, as the pay is so bad it will take you approximately 1,253 years to get a down-payment together, and then only on a one-bedroom flat in Croydon, Loughton or Dagenham, which will never be cool or trendy.
15: They will judge all your friends harshly when they order a mojito.