1.) Don’t date the crazy. Even if you are. ESPECIALLY if you are.
2.) Stay away from married men.
3.) Don’t date anyone who could give you the nickname Chlamydia Jane. :big cry:
“Fixers” are usually kinder and more forgiving when speaking of their exes.
I maintain that a guy who refers to multiple ex-girlfriends as simply “psycho” is probably doing something that makes women go a little crazy. Seriously, any woman could be pushed over the edge when she discovers that her 18 month old son has a 6 month old half-brother. Things like that tend to cause even rational women to start setting things on fire.
I think telling kids about your own experiences can sometimes sway their actions. My parents did a lot of very heavy drugs in the 60’s and told my brother and I about some of the things they saw, like the guy who thought he could fly so he jumped off the roof of the house and spilled his brains on the driveway below.
My brother and I (who were no angels by any stretch of the imagination) were both terrified of drugs. Even when friends in high school were doing cocaine, neither of us tried anything.
However at the same time, my mom got pregnant when she was a teenager and I followed suit. So…
Number one rule for guys: Never date a woman who thinks she’s an authority on all things men.
Never date a woman with enough baggage to write a book.
Actually to expand on that. There is an opportunity cost associated with sampling crazy. While it may seem fun and exciting while you are young, all the good catches are settling down with other normals.
Girls- avoid the temptation to date a “bad boy”. You already know he is, and no, you can’t change him.
Ah if only Sandra Bullock had known this …
Dudes- avoid the temptation to date a bimbo. She’s gonna cheat on you, give you a nasty disease, break you heart and your bank account, and the sex will not be worth it. Trust me. 
Don’t buy the pig when there is a world of free sausage out there!
Well, maybe not…
I’m going to ask you a question that is meant in all honesty and with no sarcasm or malice: have you, by any chance, been a stripper during any period of your life? That, to me, would easily explain meeting and dating such a diverse and ecclectic range of men; plus the lifestyle often found with some strippers includes promiscuity and other risky activities. The possibility jumped out at me reading your story.
Never date a person, man or woman, that tells you that they can be a real asshole. Believe them and don’t stick around to witness it.
Never date a person, man or woman, that badmouths their exes. You will be the one being badmouthed at some point in the future, I guarantee.
Never date a man that tells you on the first date that he went for sole custody of his small child just to get back at that bitch, his ex, and not because she’s an unfit parent.
For my son:
Don’t stick your dick in the crazy
For my daughter
Don’t let the crazy stick his dick in you.
Yeah, you’re probably right.
I’m going to assume that, along with avoid guys with “psycho” exes, you also want to avoid the guy who only has “bitches” and “whores” for exes. At best, he has poor choice in women. At worst, he’s a misogynistic asshole, and won’t treat you any better.
The same thing I tell everyone else about people, really.
If someone tells you that they’re crazy, believe them. Furthermore, crazy people, left to their own devices, do not get less crazy over time. If every last one of your friends loathes your new squeeze, your friends are probably seeing something you aren’t.
Never put up with any behavior in your own relationships that would have you telling friends ‘I would lend you some money, you can stay on my couch, I know a couple of cops who can go with you to get your stuff’ if you saw it happening from the outside.
If you ever come out of a fight asking yourself, ‘Were we both having the same conversation there?’, then you weren’t.
If you find you ask yourself ‘Why am I still talking to this person?’ on a regular basis, then it’s probably time you weren’t talking to them anymore.
You’re the only one who decides whether anyone gets ‘just one more chance’ to stay in your life. You can award a second chance as you like. Never give anyone an nth chance for any n > 2 unless that person has fucking well earned it.
You are not ‘too sensitive’. That was not ‘just a joke’. Nobody ‘always’ or 'nothing’s anything. Your feelings are not ‘stupid’. If you explain how you feel and your lover comes back with ‘I don’t even understand how you could react like that’, then they almost certainly don’t. Think about that. Really hard.
Never assume you will change your mind about: Sex, marriage, children, school/career, religion, drugs, politics, spending time with their family. You might in fact be in love, but if you find yourself having long internal discussions about it and hoping that if you stick around long enough you can get used to the idea of changing one of the above, run. You won’t, unless you count getting more and more miserable over time as a change.
On that note, never assume your SO will change their mind about any of those things, either. It’s tempting to think you’re the one special person who inspires them to have a change of heart. You aren’t. If you were, it wouldn’t even be on your radar – the change would happen organically, without needing to have fights over it.
Never, ever, ever enter into any relationship of any kind that you feel compelled to hide. The only people for whom this is not an excruciatingly bad idea are undercover cops and spies, and it doesn’t always work out well for them, either.
Right. It’s hard enough to get a guy to change his habit of leaving the toilet seat up, let alone important stuff.
If someone gets mad because you’ve hit it off with their relatives: ask the relatives for their phone numbers and drop the idiot.
I’m not sure I agree.
I don’t doubt the bona fides of your gay friends, of course, but it seems to me that the key feature of being “totally gay” is being a male and desiring sex with a male.
Since the OP is female, it seems to me that this discussion is premised on the general theory that “something inserted in male ass,” if not offset by a confident request for it, is gay. But years of reading Dan Savage have taught me that there’s plenty of behavior that is heterosexual, in the sense that it involves desire for women in sex play, but nonetheless has elements that your Gay Advisory Board might characterize as “totally gay.”
You were there, not me; you certainly have the better perspective. But … what would Dan say?
Know what? I was in a relationship with a woman who could fit that description…series of horrible boyfriends (it occurred to me after a while that…umm…wtf does that say about me?) etc. I found out after we split that she had been a stripper.
Of course, what she had told me was that she tended bar at a strip club.
I was wondering that too. How is a guy enjoying prostate stimulation from a different position an indication of closeted homosexuality? Isn’t that like telling one’s son to beware of women who like cunnilingus too much, because they’re likely closeted lesbians? (Overlooking the fact that a hetero teenage boy will likely think “Giggitygiggitygiggity!” at that, of course…)
I find it hard to believe that, statistically, I have known so many closeted lesbians. 
If I had a son, I’d tell him to avoid chicks with lists. No good ever comes of a chick with a list.
Especially since the OP’s reasoning for it basically boils down to: “One guy did this who later turned out to be gay.”