The first rule of dating isn’t to find someone who cares about you or looks at you like they don’t look at anyone else. Those shouldn’t even be rules, just implicit criteria that don’t deserve such an official status in the guide to dating. No, the first rule of dating is never date someone with a ubiquitous car.
Date someone who has a old, rusty, purple pickup truck or even a mobile dog-grooming service van, but do not date someone whose car is the Starbucks of automobiles. This isn’t because it’ll make you walk down a street just to make sure it isn’t your significant other parked outside someone else’s house in what your hyper-imaginative brain can only reason is obviously a sexual rendezvous at nine in the morning in a 55+ community (by the way, trust is one of those implicit criteria, so if that hyperbole fits the bill for you, take a step back and find yourself).
It’s because when you break-up, when they leave for college or even if they die, that transportational ubiquity is going to eat at you and more importantly eat at your healing process. In three weeks, I’ve spotted that goddamn car too many times, but it’s never him. No matter the finality of it all, all the waking seconds I spend knowing he’s not here anymore, a part of my heart still jumps at seeing it, like some sort of fucked-up dog-drooling association of going outside and embarking on an afternoon adventure.
Landmarks around town will remind you of those cool outings together, but a car brings up those memories like a sadness-delivering mobile service: “lightning fast and anywhere in the country.” A car reminds you of all those little moments spent driving, talking, laughing, singing (poorly) and realizing that for the first time, you feel a way about a person you’ve only heard described but are now beginning to truly understand for yourself.
So never date someone with a ubiquitous car, and fuck your blue Honda Fit.