IvyConnect • Upside: "IvyConnect has approved 2,000 members, who attend events a la carte or pay $45 a month or $500 a year." • Downside: Co-founded by a Goldman Sachs associate. Do you really want to do your networking with someone who couldn't make it from associate to vice president?

Ivy Connection • Upside: It's speed-dating, so you only need to spend five minutes with each Ivy-identified personage. • Downside: Admits Duke graduates.

the Ivy Plus Society • Upside: "there are no meetings, dues or other obligations save attending parties." • Downside: "hot beats to make sure you get movin' and groovin' on the dancefloor!"

IvyLife [...]

Planning the end of a relationship is probably the closest many of us will ever get to knowing what it's like to plot a murder. Will they see it coming?, you wonder. Some of us are careless, impulsive relationship-murderers, and so the breakups happen spontaneously, the time and place as random as Clue cards. Others plan it all out, postponing, buying time until the perfect opportunity, thinking over the most humane method. Maybe you'll wait for the vernal equinox on account of your partner's Seasonal Affective Disorder. But then he or she might forever associate the sadness of the breakup with cherry blossoms and freshly graffiti'd "Nurse Jackie" posters, [...]

Since we gathered a truly huge pile of data from our online dating survey, we've published advice about how to improve online dating for everyone, for folks who date men and folks who date women. Now, in our final installment of this very special dating survey roundup, we bring you: The Most Horrific Things Encountered While Online Dating. A word of warning here? Most of these are really funny. And then, in a small section towards the end, some of them are absolutely not funny. We're including some extremely frank stuff, including about sexual assault. If you're not up for reading about that today, you should take a [...]

This post is sponsored by eHarmony. Date smarter. Start now, free! Alright! 2,208 people actually completed our survey last week about online dating. So, for starters this week, we're looking at responses about online dating by people who date men. It's a combination of helpful tips, deep experiences and some frank examples of what dudes might think about not doing. We want to help you, guys—but you have to allow us. So open your minds, and your heart will follow. Or something like that. Let us take you through it all, from profile picture, to email exchanges, to meeting and greeting. Take our hand, we'll get there together! [...]

A totally underrated thing about girlfriends is that they make great hostages. Not in the sense that you should threaten to neutralize one per hour if your demands aren’t met, but rather that they’re forced to come along and suffer through any event with you, no matter how long or boring it is or how many guitar solos J Mascis is allotted. As long as you buy the tickets and furnish the requisite number of drinks, they're legally obligated to stick it out. (Torts of negligence can and have been filed.) But unlike someone in an actual hostage situation, your detainee is expected to have fun—or at least do [...]

"Most white men either see me as the ‘me so horny' girl or I'm ‘cute.' My white girlfriends think, ‘He thinks you're cute!' And I think, ‘No, he wants me in a school girl outfit," said my adopted Korean-American friend Rachel, who grew up in my small hometown.

Well, this isn't new. Most Asian-American girls could probably tell you a similar story. Rebecca, a 23-year-old adoptee from Wisconsin, once had a guy tell her that it's "every guy's dream to have sex with an Asian girl." Rachel knows that "when I go to a bar and there are 80 white girls, 19 black girls, and me, I'm not surprised [...]

Press release of the day! "The world's very first dating site for dog lovers celebrates its fourth birthday today. Founded on 3rd January 2006 by Derek Collinson, a Scottish entrepreneur with a passion for dogs, it is now home to thousands of single dog lovers looking to meet someone who shares their love of man's best friend. Derek explains 'There are an estimated 40 million million single dog owners in America alone who find it difficult to meet other singles who don't mind sharing their lives with dogs and all that entails (no pun intended).'… And to celebrate its fourth birthday www.doglover.biz is offering new members a free [...]

I was barely a moment inside Walmart, studying the cucumbers and avocados, when a middle-aged man came up to say hi.

We started talking about the oil boom sweeping Williston, North Dakota. He said his coworkers were losing it out here in the middle of nowhere. Maybe he would lose it too.

"You gotta really be focused on your shit," he said. "And it's hard. And on that note, that's why you should let me take you to dinner."

I declined. He called later that evening to ask me on a date. He said he'd take me to Pizza Hut. I was not pining for a rendezvous with a roustabout [...]

Two years ago this month came Negroni Season, a terrifying installment in the incredible true tales of The Worst Boyfriend in the World. It has been three years since the first installment, Crazy Like a Foxwoods. (We'll be wrapping this up in the year 2024.) Now it's Negroni season once again—so let's dive back in to learn what came next!

What kept me going during the first year of living together was the belief that if the Boyfriend could just quit drinking for good, as he occasionally attempted to do, we’d be home free.

And, even though my "Sober Sundays" initiative never took off, somehow that’s what [...]

Many moons ago, a few thousand of you filled out a survey about dating online. A few moons after that, we compiled all the best tips and tricks shared by folks who date men. And now here we are with advice for women, kindly suggested by the men and women who date them. Some of this advice is the same advice that people wanted to give to the men! But some of it is different. Then next week we'll share your many, many horrifying (although sometimes okay) Online Dating Stories and we'll all have a good cry, laugh or "awww" together. For now, though, here's what our respondents [...]

It’s pretty hard to reverse engineer a meet-cute. These things either happen or they don’t. If you were really serious about it, you could probably arrange for, say, an errant shopping cart to go charging off in someone's direction and then you could rush up behind it saying, "Sorry, sorry!" and that’s how you'd meet, but then you’d have to live with yourself for the next 50 years or so, knowing that, basically, you're Elmer Fudd. Sometimes when a radiant single lady comes floating along the sidewalk like a dream, I think about stopping her. But I never would. It just seems as intrusive as a catcall—or an errant [...]

Now this is happening: "If you are looking for a 'salad soulmate,' all you have to do is create a free profile on saladmatch.com and your "best' mate will be selected based on 'which Just Salad location you frequent, when you frequent it, and what ingredients you love in your salad.' Similar to other online dating sites (eHarmony, Match.com, Zoosk.com), SaladMatch.com boasts a 'state-of-the-art matching algorithm" and guarantees your will have lunch or dinner tastes in common.'"

A series on the stuff that delighted us on the Internet this year.

I grew up in Massachusetts but at the other end of the state from Boston, so I never really got into the Boston Globe. Not that I imagine my friends who grew up near Boston were all obsessed with the Boston Globe or anything. God, I am being so boring right now, aren't I? This boringness is not something I would indulge in on a blind date. But what I am trying to do—and this is a segue I would never use on a blind date—is talk about my absolute favorite thing on the internet, which [...]

Zero minutes after incident (a.i.) Pain. Ow. That’s real pain. I move her off me and roll onto my stomach. Miscalculations have happened before; a few seconds of discomfort and then it's go time again. I roll back over and look down to see if it’s go time again. I rise up off the bed: "Yeah, this… this isn't right." I sit back down. The woman beside me looks so horror-stricken, I try to sound especially calm when talking to 911. I don't tell the operator it's so swollen and purple that I'm afraid it'll burst at any moment. Instead I say, in an even, measured tone, “My penis is [...]

I'm not sure that I'm sold on this new book, but I'm DEFINITELY pro any venture that is in favor of real-talking women about straight men. People don't break up with people enough! Go on, break up with someone today! If you love something and it doesn't love you right back, stab it until it loves you correctly!

The second in a short series about sharing, caring and not going it alone. In this installment: Friends and roommates Katie Heaney and Rylee Main practice pick-up strategies.

Katie: So as you may know, one of the two us generally has a boyfriend, and the other one of us usually never does. And, hypothetically speaking, it doesn’t totally matter which one of us is each of those people. Right? But you are the one who always has a boyfriend. And sometimes, because of that, I consider you to be somewhat of a man wizard. Not like you ARE a man, but that you are a wizard, with a high-level [...]

Ooh, Racialicious just started a four-part panel discussion on interracial dating. I always like when people talk about funny perceptions of race when they were young, like this one: "There were a ton of interracial relationships in my family. For the longest time I assumed my white aunts were just fair-skinned black women."

World's most useful applied mathematics explained in full.