Neverisms

World (1987)

In his compendium of advice for recent high school and college graduates, Smith also offered these rules:

Never date a man who goes shopping with his mother.

Never date someone you work with. Especially the boss.

Never answer an advertisement seeking a “liberal room-mate.”

You probably are not that liberal.

“Never Choose a Loser”ABIGAIL VAN BUREN, title of “Dear Abby” column

In a 1978 column, a fifteen-year-old Washington state girl asked Abby for advice about dating a twenty-nine-year-old divorced man who worked in a gas station. In writing the headline, Van Buren was probably influenced by the girl’s comment, “The poor guy has really had a messed-up life.” Abby finished with this admonition: “Never have anything to do with a fellow you can’t bring home and introduce to your parents.”

Never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.GORE VIDAL

Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel,

for love is not ours to command.ALAN WATTS

Never ask a woman her weight on the first date.MICHAEL WEATHERLY

Weatherly said this as Special Agent Anthony “Tony” DiNozzo in a Season One episode of NCIS in 2003. In a Season Four episode, he offered another dehortation: “Never date a woman who eats more than you do.”1. Never put makeup on at a table.2. Never ask a man where he has been.3. Never keep him waiting.4. Never baby him when he is disconsolate.5. Never fail to baby him when he is sick or has a hangover.6. Never let him see you when you are not at your best.7. Never talk about your other dates or boyfriends of the past.MAE WEST, in “How to Hold a Man” (1935), quoted

by W. Safire and L. Safir in Words of Wisdom (1990)

Never let a man define who you are.OPRAH WINFREY, attributed, but not verified

For several years, this and a number of other Winfrey quotations have been widely circulated on the Internet, often under the heading, “What Oprah Winfrey Had to Say about Men.” They have never been documented, and neither I nor other quotation researchers have been able to verify them. Some are quite interesting, though, especially the neverisms. Even though I can’t vouch for their authenticity, here they are:

Never co-sign for a man.

Never borrow someone else’s man.

Never move into his mother’s house.

Never let a man know everything. He will use it against you later.

Never live your life for a man before you find what makes you truly happy.

I attribute my whole success in life

to a rigid observance of the fundamental rule—

Never have yourself tattooed with any woman’s name,

not even her initials.P. G. WODEHOUSE, from a character in French Leave (1956)

Never give the heart outright.WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

This is a line from “Never Give All the Heart,” a 1904 poem stimulated by Yeats’s legendary—and famously unrequited—love for Maud Gonne. The entire first stanza of the poem looks like a recognition on Yeats’s part that he might have erred by coming on a bit too soon and a bit too strong:Never give all the heart, for loveWill hardly seem worth thinking ofTo passionate women if it seemCertain. . . .

ten

Never Change Diapers in Mid-Stream

Marriage, Home & Family Life

In the early morning of July 6, 2008, Susan Striker, a Greenwich, Connecticut, art teacher, engaged in a familiar morning ritual—retrieving the early edition of the New York Times from her doorstep, making herself a cup of hot tea, and settling back into bed for a relaxing morning read. After skimming over the front-page headlines and perusing her favorite sections, she arrived at the op-ed page, where her eyes were immediately drawn to the words “An Ideal Husband,” the title of a Maureen Dowd column.

In writing her column that week, Dowd was inspired by a remark that supermodel Christie Brinkley had recently made in divorce proceedings against husband Peter Cook, a prominent New York architect. After discovering that Cook had been having an affair with his eighteen-year-old assistant and paying out more than three grand a month for Internet porn and swinger websites, Brinkley said: “The man who I was living with, I just didn’t know who he was.”

As Dowd reflected on Brinkley’s remark, she found herself wondering what a woman would need to do to avoid such a sad and painful outcome. To answer the question, she interviewed Pat Connor, a seventy-nine-year-old Roman Catholic priest living in New Jersey. Connor, with over forty years of experience as a marriage counselor, had distilled his lifetime of experience into a lecture for high school seniors—girls mainly—that he titled “Whom Not to Marry.” When he was asked to summarize his talk, the first thing he offered was this rule:

Never marry a man who has no friends.

This usually means that he will be

incapable of the intimacy that marriage demands.

Father Connor offered several other guidelines as well, but it was this first one that kept coming back to Susan Striker’s mind as she sipped her morning tea and read the article. Several years earlier, after her second marriage ended in divorce, she compiled a number of similar never marry a man thoughts. She expanded her original list to more than two dozen after interviewing several divorced friends and incorporating their ideas (she had once even considered writing a magazine article on the subject, but that never panned out). Striker hadn’t looked at her list for a few years, but Dowd’s article—and especially Father Connor’s admonition—brought it all back to mind. She put down the paper and hurried off to her study, hoping to find it on a file in her computer.

If the truth be told, Striker had a fondness for rules beginning with the word never. In 2001, she’d written Young at Art, a book on fostering artistic creativity in infants and young children. Writing that “art is not a frill” but a bedrock foundation for the development of later skills, she laid out “Ten Cardinal Rules for Teaching Creative Art.” Five were expressed neveristically, including:

Never show a child “how” to draw.

Never encourage children to participate in art contests