• Step One: Keep an open mind, especially when it comes to letting a handsome young stranger install a neon sign in your window to supposedly surprise his girlfriend on Valentine's day. "He looked harmless enough, but I engaged him in innocuous banter to see if he breathed fire. Then I took a leap of faith — not wholly unlike the one I took 17 years earlier when I let my husband into my life — and ushered him inside."
  

So the chatterers around the water cooler this week—we FULLY DO TOO have a water cooler in the office!—are still on about this Sunday's New York Times Modern Love column. For those of you who were lucky enough to be too high or too dead to read it, it's about a nice lady who went to the fertility clinic and came back with three feti. Fetuses. Whatever! Precious, beautiful thumbnails of human life! Very, very expensive thumbnails, it turns out. Bad news! Apparently, you paid a lot of money for them!

So, yes, Andy Christie's story of being surprised, on his birthday, by the notion that a younger woman might be attracted to his flabby self — only to be even more surprised, later, to find that she was just a decoy to lead him to his surprise birthday party — grossed us out. But then commenter TedSez pointed out that this installment of Mod Luv didn't just sound lame, it sounded lame in a familiar way. He pointed us to Snopes, the urban legends database, where we read this 1976 Ann Landers column. The story's a bit different — it concerns a boss and his comely secretary, it being 1976 and all — but the gist is shockingly similar:

Every week, it seems, the sage minds who operate the Sunday Styles apparatus do their darndest to find a new way to make our tummies churn. Here is how we imagine it going in their minds: "Well, in recent weeks we have troubled readers with the tale of a lady who semi-raped her lover, and with a bizarre defense of a campus rapist by an ex-girlfriend who went into icky detail about his lack of sexual prowess. Where do we go now? What's ickier than rape?"

Ok, so let's compare and contrast:

It's not news that the Modern Love column is typically an example of the Times turning into the world's creepiest personal ads section. But this weekend's entry was probably one of the off-the-charts ickiest; it concerns Columbia student Ashley Cross, whose affair with an accused rapist changed her mind about a lot of things:

Not that they all aren't, but yesterday's Modern Love column in the Times was excruciatingly painful in that "can't look away" fashion that is the column's stock in trade. Basically it's an extended love letter from a woman to her former stalking (and, depending on your view of the situation, sexual assault) victim. Apart from the ridiculousness of the piece itself, there's the oddly jarring feeling that this is pretty much the world's least subtle "call me" invitation in history, but printed nationwide in the Paper of Record. If you haven't read it, be warned: It's rough sledding. And as if that's not enough, Gawker has obtained a copy of next week's Modern Love. It works the same thematic territory, and follows after the jump.

So it's the week after Thanksgiving, and you're still feeling bloated. In a combined effort to keep your mouth full so that you couldn't be expected to answer your relatives' annoying questions and to make the schlep home to Buttfuck worthwhile, you gorged yourself on turkey, etc. and now you feel like a giant stuffed elephantelopenfant yourself. What to do? Well, we'd never advocate eating disordered behavior, but sometimes a quick purge is just necessary. And if sticking your finger down your throat doesn't appeal, you can always try this paragraph from this Sunday's Modern Love column. Worked for us!

Maybe next time they could show the Twin Towers as a pair of spread legs. That might be slightly more tasteful.