Like pretty much everyone else, I’ve been entranced by FX’s Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette. That’s not because I believe all that much in the dream of Camelot, or have any real memory of the ’90s in New York City (Jenna Maroney from 30 Rock voice: I don’t remember it because I was too young!), but because I can’t look away from the gorgeously elusive, cig-smoking, cool-girl vision of femininity presented by Sarah Pidgeon’s Carolyn (that is, until the press started sapping her life force, but I digress).
In the fourth episode of Love Story, as she’s dodging calls from John F. Kennedy Jr. (played by the appallingly hot Paul Anthony Kelly), her friend Narciso Rodriguez asks her, coyly: “Screening his calls. What, did you read that in The Rules or something?” This—the idea that there was some organizing principle undergirding Carolyn’s mantra of “Exploit his insecurities”—intrigued me, and before I knew it, I was deep in the lore behind 1995’s The Rules: Time-tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right, Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider’s step-by-step manual for finding the warm glow of heterosexual love. Now that I’m single and somewhat reluctantly putting my theoretical bisexuality into practice, it felt like the perfect time to find out whether the book still had actionable advice in the age of app dating. (Without even a trace of CBK relevance, Fein and Schneider’s early aughts follow-up The Rules for Online Dating: Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right in Cyberspace held somewhat less appeal.)
To be fair, I’m not sure The Rules made sense even in the mid-’90s, and they sure as hell weren’t feminist. (Among other things, Fein and Schneider encourage readers not to talk to a man first, not to stare at men, not to talk to men too much, not to call them or frequently return their calls, and, of course, not to rush into intimacy.) But after a decade of queerness and a four-year-long relationship, I was ready to embrace being “a creature unlike any other,” so this past week I endeavored to put The Rules to the test.
Committed journalist that I am, I dutifully dragged myself out to a Hinge date on Sunday night (after covering the 2026 Oscars, mind you: where’s my Pulitzer?). And it was not just any date, either, but my very first with a cisgender, heterosexual man in roughly a decade.
There is nothing in The Rules about pounding two glasses of orange wine at the bar before your date arrives, so I obviously did that to calm my racing nerves. Then, when he did show up, I proceeded to break pretty much every guideline set forth by Fein and Schneider, including not talking to him first (I hate awkward silences!), not going Dutch (I reflexively asked if he wanted a beer when I went to get my third wine and he took me up on it!), not opening up too fast (I don’t totally remember, but I think I talked a lot about my childhood?), and, of course, the cardinal sin: “Don’t do more than casual kissing on the first date.”
I’m too much of a lady to reveal much more, but suffice it to say that I did end this date (and not first; another Rules no-no) by inviting this man over to my apartment, where my tiny, mean dog—who is clearly far more of a Rules-follower than I am—barked at him for a good 20 minutes and I served him water out of a wine glass like the domestic goddess that I am. Then, immediately upon his departure, I felt myself turn into a Cathy cartoon. Did he like me? Would I see him again? Had I ruined any possibility of being properly pursued by throwing The Rules aside despite my best intentions?