Last week, I wrote about my friend Amber’s breakup and I mentioned how terrible her boyfriend was. But when the relationship first started, I thought he was great. I was thrilled to see her with a man who loved her and treated her like a princess. Then, the tides turned. By the end, the best thing that could be said about her ex was that he was nice, sometimes. But more often than not, he was rude, immature, stubborn, and completely disrespectful toward my girl.

Her situation made me wonder why it’s easy for so many women to brush faults and incompatibilities under the rug, moving along with a relationship as if nothing were wrong at all. The thing is, Amber’s a smart gal. She has more motivation—and integrity—than anyone I know. But for every red flag from her ex, she had ten excuses ready to gloss over it. If she can fall for this guy, then what hope do the rest of us have at objectivity in a relationship?

I could never really fault her for staying with him because I’ve done the same stupid thing myself more times than I care to admit. At times I’ve been perfectly happy to ignore legitimate problems in the hopes of “maybe this one will stick.” From seemingly small things, like hating the way he dresses, to more legitimate concerns like him not wanting children when I do, I’ve glossed over them all.

These hiccups always catch up to me in the end, at which point I’ve wasted time crossing my fingers for someone who wasn’t right in the first place. Certain parts of my dating history suggest I put more emphasis on a wing and a prayer than I do on actual compatibility.

After facing so many hurdles with Alex, eventually our problems became too much for us to handle and we fell apart. Hopefully that taught me a lesson, but sometimes I’ll still catch myself airbrushing red flags out of the men I meet. On one of my first post-breakup dates, I was out with a guy who was way too high maintenance for my tastes. He spent most of the evening talking about the brand of his watch and his favorite types of (overpriced) wine. And I still gave him a second, then third, date. Why? I like to think it was because my dating skills were rusty at that time, which they were, but I still looked past the obvious incompatibility and gave him more of a chance than he deserved.

There’s a fine line between objectivity and romance. Love, by nature, is tied to your heart and not your mind, which clouds most reasonable judgment. Many women—Amber and myself included—are just trying to find a balance between looking at a relationship impartially and falling head over irrational heels.

Luckily, I’m getting better at dismissing men who just aren’t worth the effort. And the next time I meet a guy who can only talk about his accessories and vino of choice, I’ll run the other way without a second thought.

My friend Amber recently broke up with her boyfriend of four months. Even though they had only been together a short time, they moved at lightning speed and with the seriousness of a heart attack, so the breakup was dramatic, devastating—and 100% necessary, since he was terrible for her.

When it ended, Amber and I had daily conversations about how she was doing and what she was thinking. In the span of a week, she went from heartbroken to sympathetic to wanting him back to downright angry. This man treated her like dirt, and I’m thrilled to have her in the pissed-off stage rather than pining after his love or feeling sorry for him.

This is the first time I’ve gotten to apply my breakup experiences to help someone else, and I have to say, I’m glad they’re coming in handy. I’m coaching Amber through the process and remembering what it was like for me during the first stages of my own breakup.

And as you all know, every recent breakup-sufferer needs all the help she can get. When Amber said she just wanted to be over him already, I reminded her that it had only been two days since they broke up. She just needed to have some patience and not let anyone rush her. When she wished that he would take her back, I reminded her how much of a jerk he was (seriously—he’s awful) and explained why she was so much better off without him. When she finally admitted that she’s glad he’s out of the picture, I cheered her on.

I’m thrilled now that she’s reached the angry stage. In one of my first posts, I wrote about how I’d take anger over heartbreak any day of the week. Plus, as my friend Scott told me when I broke up with Alex, that anger is important. Either you deal with being pissed off now, or you’ll have to work through it in the future. Either way, it’s going to come around sometime. Amber has every right to be mad, and while that doesn’t mean she’s over her sadness, it does mean she doesn’t want to be with The Biggest Jerk in the World anymore. And that’s wonderful.

As I said before: anyone going through a breakup needs all the help she can get. If you have any advice or encouraging words for my girl, leave them in the comments (trust me—she’ll be reading!).

About a month ago, I was on my lunch break at work when I bumped into a girl from my high school graduating class. In the midst of choosing a sandwich, I heard her voice behind me: “Michelle?”

It turns out she also left our small Pennsylvania town and (like me) works in the magazine industry. What’s more, her office is a block away from mine. We never really knew each other in high school, but since this is such a strange coincidence we’re planning to get together soon and swap stories (namely: how the hell did she end up in almost exactly the same place as I did?).

As if this blast from the past weren’t enough, a long-gone ex-boyfriend of mine emailed me this week. The last time we spoke was probably four years ago, and since then I think he moved to Ohio to work in finance (I suppose I can ask him that if I return the email). He had found my blog online (hi Mr. Ex, if you’re reading this…) and wanted to congratulate me.

This all reminded me of a saying my friend John has: “No one is ever really gone.” He repeats this every time he gets an email from an old friend, or unexpectedly bumps into the first girl he ever held hands with in kindergarten. He also likes to recite it when a friend suddenly fades out of his life. Someday, in one way or another, he knows they’ll be back.

I think of this whenever I come across someone from my past (like the girl from my hometown or my ex-boyfriend), but it can also be reassuring with current friends. “No one is ever really gone” is a short step from, “Never count someone out, because who knows what will happen in the future.”

For example, that guy you’ve always had a crush on but the timing has never been right? It’s pretty likely that, one day, something will work out. And that acquaintance you always love seeing but have never really made it into each other’s day-to-day lives? Maybe someday you’ll live in the same neighborhood and poof: instant friendship. No one’s ever really gone.

I feel this way about Alex sometimes. I don’t think he’ll ever be back in a romantic way—we didn’t work the first time, so there’s no reason to believe we’d magically transform our relationship on another go-around. But even if our minimal contact now completely drops off, just as it did with my other, out-of-the-blue emailing ex, Alex will never really be gone.

In any case, it’s a nice comfort to remember anything can happen. Thinking back on how many people who, after seemingly disappearing from my life, eventually wiggled their ways back in, I have a feeling Alex will pop his head up again somewhere. Maybe not as the star of the show, but at least on a guest appearance.

I love men. There’s just something about them as a population that drives me crazy. Every once in a while, I’ll see a man do something, say something, or act a certain way, and I fall in love with the Y chromosome all over again.

One of the perks of having a serious boyfriend was being able to see all the wonderful ‘man’ things on a regular basis. From the sexy things, like watching him putting on a tie (oh yeah, it gets to me), to the sweet things, like him coming up from behind and wrapping me in his arms—they all just killed me. Even some seemingly boring things had me smitten. Shaving, for instance—don’t ask me why, but I swear I could watch that man shave every day and never get bored.

Now that I’m single, I have to take what I can get. Long gone are the intimate days of tie-watching, but I still come across the beloved guy-traits sometimes. Just the sight of a group of men walking down the street in suits catches my breath. Or seeing a guy being sweet with his girl over dinner—a forehead kiss or shoulder squeeze will do it to me every time. This isn’t to say I’ll swoon over just any man. If I’m attracted to a guy, it’s because of qualities that are unique to him, not because he happens to be wearing a suit. But there are still those general qualities that I love about men as a whole.

I sometimes wonder if everyone feels this way about their gender of preference, or if it’s just me. Do men love watching a woman put on a dress or do her hair in the morning? They might, although it could be for different reasons (if she’s putting on a dress, that means she must not have been wearing the dress earlier).

Since I already have a good idea of what women like, I decided to ask my guy friends to pinpoint that certain je ne sais quoi that makes their hearts skip a beat. I started with my friend John, who said he loves it when a woman’s hair is wet (and he swears it’s not a sexual thing). “It implies a certain comfort level between you two that’s fun to have,” he said. Other traits on John’s list: girls who have a stuffed animal on their beds, girls who wear baseball caps, and watching a woman cook.

The cooking thing came up a few times—my friend Mike also likes a woman who can do more than order in. For him, other swoon-worthy traits include the image of a woman wearing a wool coat in the winter with her hair down (he blames this one on a Bob Dylan album cover), the fresh smell of shampoo, and girls who wear his button-down shirts.

Like Mike and John, my friend James loves a girl who cooks (it seems the way to a man’s heart really is through his stomach). “If you can make my taste buds scream, ‘yes, yes, more!’ then I just wonder what else you can do,” he said. Beyond the kitchen, James also thinks it’s cute when girls cry or get angry (even though we’re probably just pissed off at the time, I guess it’s nice that someone finds it attractive). He also likes white pants, shy girls, and when a woman kisses his hand while they’re cuddling (cue the collective “awww”).

I was happy to hear it’s not just me who has a laundry list of little, innocuous traits that drive me crazy. Like Kramer loving velvet scrunchies (anyone?), it seems every guy has different, sometimes very specific, preferences. Except for cooking. Apparently all men love a girl who can cook, which means I might just have to dust off my Crock Pot.

What about you? What is it about men/women that you adore? Leave some comments and let me know what little traits make you swoon.

I think my nose is leading a mutiny against me. I’ll go days without even a thought of Alex, and then all of a sudden I’ll get a whiff of something that will bring back a flood of memories and interrupt my day.

For example: While I was dressing for work earlier this week (in the record-breaking heat, I might add), I reached for my favorite warm-weather perfume. The same perfume I used to spritz on before summer dates with Alex last year. Needless to say, this was a bad idea.

As soon as it hit my wrist, I was inundated with memories of happy days with Alex. I saw myself in the car with him, driving to meet some friends for drinks. I remembered us spending a lazy Saturday morning in our local coffee shop. I swear I could hear the sounds of the fireworks we once watched while perched on a bridge in town.

This is hardly the first time my nose has betrayed me. A few months ago, I smelled his cologne on a passing stranger and thought of little else for the rest of the day. But a new season means new scents, and after spending the last two summers with Alex, it’s strange to start one without him.

It seems personal fragrances are only the beginning. Strangely enough, I associate smells with Alex that essentially have nothing to do with him. The festering smell of the warm subway, for instance (gross, I know, but hear me out). Alex and I were never really in New York together, but since I spent a lot of time with him last summer while I commuted into the city to work, I pair that terrible odor with him (poor guy). I can remember standing down there after work, waiting for the subway that would take me to the bus that would take me to Alex.

Sometimes I can’t even pinpoint the scent, or the memory for that matter. It might just be a passing thought tied to a cleaning solution in my office or someone’s shampoo in the elevator. These attacks of vivid memories are getting to be a pain, but luckily there’s been enough time between the breakup and now (about six months) that they’ve lost their sting. Still, they’re here and as lucid as ever.

There’s an old saying: “don’t cut off your nose to spite your face.” The meaning may not apply here, but with every new scent-memory interruption, I’m becoming more and more tempted to cut the stupid thing off anyway. If I don’t stand up to it soon, it might convince my ears and mouth to join le resistance against my single-girl sanity, and nothing good can come of that.

Since I’m new to this whole “single” thing, I sometimes seek advice from my single friends. And almost all of them tell me they have deal breakers in their relationships. Whether it’s something as big as never wanting to get married or as small as not liking the same music, anything can kill a relationship. According to my friends, once they learned what they can and can’t put up with, they streamlined the dating process by weeding out the bad apples quickly and efficiently.

I seem to have missed this lesson in Dating 101. The words—“deal breaker”—are part of everyone’s lexicon but my own. I have standards, of course, but the things that would kill a relationship for me are more obvious than, say, “his car is old” or “I don’t like his cat.” For example, I refuse to date a smoker, and I steer clear of men who have bad breath or scratch themselves in public. But for the most part, I consider every romantic possibility in its own right.

Now that I’ve rejoined the singles scene, however, I’m starting to think my friends might be on to something. In my deal-breaker-free romantic life, I fear I’m wasting time on men who never stood a chance in the first place. Most recently there was no-spark guy—we got along really well, but I should have paid attention to the lack of a real connection that eventually led to our demise. Before him was uber-metrosexual man, whose conversational skills revolved around the type of his watch and brand of his clothing (I’m convinced that not only did his outfit cost more than mine, he spent more time creating an ensemble than I did).

The thing is, I’m just too damn optimistic. Often times, I’ll gloss over legitimate problems in the spirit of giving each man the benefit of the doubt. I’ve turned a blind eye to everything from “he doesn’t make me laugh” to “he never wants children.” Of course these problems always catch up to me in the end, at which point I realize I’ve wasted time crossing my fingers for someone who was never right for me in the first place. An objective look at my dating history suggests I put more emphasis on a wing and a prayer than I do on actual compatibility.

To be fair, Alex never had anything remotely resembling a deal breaker. But by the end of the relationship I had collected enough red flags to mark off a construction zone. We may have made it two years, but I have to wonder that maybe if I had implemented a deal-breaker policy prior to meeting him, I would have recognized the signs earlier and been able to call it off without prolonging the process.

Now that I’m single again, I’ve been trying to see through the eyes of my friends. I attempt to look at each guy objectively and decide what role he should play in my life. Is he a one-date man? Should I see him again and see how things go? Can I make him into “just a friend”?

I worry that I’m being too picky, which is why I never had many dealbreakers to begin with. But I figure I still have enough of the old optimism to reach a decent balance between hope and realism.