Hee. There's some real winners there. There's also some people who obviously have bad associations with some perfectly innocuous traits and so are rejecting them like mad, but we all have our personal issues to deal with. (Rejecting someone because he tucks his T-shirts in? Come on! Once you're dating, you casually mention that untucked T-shirts are a sort of turn-on for you, and if he's got half a brain cell he'll never tuck one in when in your presence again. Problem solved!)

I suspect that a lot of what they think are deal-breakers are more guidelines in practice. I know there's traits that annoy the hell out of me in some people that I really don't mind in others, because there's other aspect of them that make up for it.

I've got one clear deal-breaker for me, though: in highschool, I was on the phone with a guy who was interested in me. At one point he said, in a way that was clear I was meant to take it as a compliment, "Man, you're smart and you can draw, too! That's more than a woman oughta have!"

Uh, yeah. And he didn't see what was wrong with that statement, too.

Not arguing with you on the pants-hit-his-shoes thing, but I suspect that what they're arguing against on the gold-chain thing is a cultural sterotype: the sterotype of a gold-chain-wearing man is straight out of the 70s if he's white, where he's an oily disco lounge lizard, and from the rap world of a playa if he's black. I think dooce's readership is primarily white, so it's mostly the oily lounge lizard with his gold chain and wide-lapeled shirt unbuttoned a few buttons that they're thinking of.

I must remember that one. XD

I think it depends what you mean by physical attraction - where are your standards? And for me, physical attraction comes third after intelligence and compatible sense of humor (NO PUN ADDICTS I HATE THOSE AND THEY INFEST FANDOM). And my standards for physical attraction also depend on the guy, but there's a few things I just can't deal with - bad teeth is the A#1 thing, extremely weak chin is another.

I had a dealbreaker a couple of years ago, although I was actually not looking and I think I was a decade odler than he was and significantly more socially savvy. But I had a guy attempt to chat me up in the manga section of a Barnes & Noble, completely missing the hints my monosyllabic replies and fixed stare on the shelves were attempting to send. And then I noticed ... he spent the entire time he was talking to me attempting to dig his pants out of his ass. I almost burst into laughter.

If intelligence and sense of humor was all it took, I'd be hitting on you. ;)

Then we must be star-crossed, unrequited, tragic lovers!

(I watched a kick flick starrign Jet Li not too long ago where the character of his mother disgused herself as a man to fight a neighboring fmaily's mother, who'd sworn to marry her daughter only to the person who could beat her, so that Jet Li could marry the daughter and of course the other mother fell in love with Jet Li's mother in disguise. And one of the best things they did with that was later on, when the other mother died of ... I don't remember, a wound or a random mysterious illness or something - by then she'd figured out that Jet Li's mother was really a woman, but still confessed her love anyway, and Jet Li's mother held her as she died and seriously promised that they'd meet again in their reincarnations. Too bad most of the rest of the movie was sort of dull.)