The day of my third date with this wonderful girl I learned that a close friend had committed suicide. I was overcome with grief, but so afraid the news would turn her off, I made up a story to cover why I had to break plans. She believed it, and things went well for a while, but I couldn’t keep up the façade and eventually said a bunch of stupid things. I later left a message on her machine, not only to apologize but to tell her the truth. It came out all wrong. I wrote her a letter, but again failed to explain. I tried a third time, with a letter including my phone number, in hopes I could tell it to her straight. She then complained to our college dean. I still see her at school and feel horrible that I was never able to come clean. Don’t I at least owe her an explanation?

Chances are, however, this girl’s a member of a much larger group, Women Who Like Men Who Appear To Have Emotions, Plus The Guts To Reveal Them From Time To Time. Emotional expressiveness is measured on a scale from emotionally vacant to emotionally available (the ideal) to the emotional equivalent of 26 illegal immigrants packed into an 8 by 10 studio apartment with one semi-functional toilet in the hall. In general, no woman worth having wants some wet dishrag of a man who cries himself to sleep whenever his neighbor gets a parking ticket -- or, at the other extreme, a man who reacts to the death of a friend with all the heart and soul of a baked potato.

If you want women to flock to you, hand out money. Even the worst guy in the world can get a girlfriend who rents by the hour. Of course, your shapeshifting attempts are a version of what those girls do, but instead of strutting your stuff in fuchsia platforms and a miniskirt the size of a paper cut, you’re unstrutting your stuff -- not selling yourself, just selling yourself out. This isn’t to say you should start first dates with “Hi, my name is Joey, I’m an alcoholic.” But, perhaps you heard wrong way back when: It’s “every girl wants a pony,” not a phony.

Everybody makes mistakes. What separates the men from the poodles is how they clean them up. Let’s just say your efforts to “tell it to her straight” weren’t exactly John Cusack/”Say Anything” moments. For the uninitiated, Cusack’s character tries to win his girl back by standing under her window in the middle of the night holding his boom box over his head and blasting Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes.” And then there’s you, the anti-Cusack, leaving all those cryptic notes and meandering phone messages. That’s kind of like e-mailing the girl to ask her to download the song -- after upgrading to a new operating system, which should only take about 14 hours on the phone with tech support in Calcutta.

Forget trying to “come clean” (any further mousy yet stalkerish attempts to get her back) and focus on coming into some self-acceptance. Without it, girls won’t like you or respect you, and neither will you. Once you’re cool with who you are, all that matters is giving a relationship your best shot -- even if the response from the girl in the window is “Romeo, Romeo…wouldya turn that damn thing down?!”

I'm a 20-year-old college student who grew up in an area that was mostly Asian-American. Naturally, most of my friends from home are Asian, as is my girlfriend of four years. Thanks to social networking Web sites, anyone at my (mostly white) college can see pictures of my friends and girlfriend. A disturbing number imply -- or outright say -- I must have a “fetish” for Asian girls. My girlfriend is brilliant, beautiful, and makes me laugh like no other. I hope to marry her one day, but I’m worried that people will never believe I truly love her. How do I stop them from getting this impression?

Whatever happened to “Hi, howya doin’?”/”Wicked hangover. You?” These people get right to it: “Excuse me, but do you have a racially based sexual obsession?” You could respond with the truth: “Actually, I fell for the girl next door. She’s Japanese, as was the girl next door to her, and the girl next door to her.” But, maybe you’d rather give them what they deserve: “Actually, I’m just biding time with the Asian chick between crawling under tables at the library and trying to suck unsuspecting women’s toes.” In other words, perhaps their time would be better spent pursuing another disturbing coincidence from your MySpace page: Your sordid history of dating women with feet.

If you couldn’t get turned on without feet, you would have a fetish -- a sexual compulsion for an inanimate object or non-sexual body part. If they had to be Asian feet, you’d have an Asian foot fetish. The “Asian fetish” you’ve been accused of is slang for an obsession with the stereotypical Asian woman -- submissive, subservient, and demure. That woman is readily available in porn and old movies, but if you’ve got to have her in real life, good luck. I know a number of Asian-American women, all complete failures as “fragile lotus blossoms” -- for example, my comedienne friend Sandra Tsing Loh who got fired from the Los Angeles NPR station for saying a word you’ll never see on one of their pledge-drive tote bags.

Sure, it’s a bit of a surprise for a kid from some Midwestern suburb where everybody’s as white as a paper towel to meet a white guy whose friends are all named Park (the Smith of Korea) or Chan (the Jones of China). If only he’d get knee-jerk inquisitive instead of knee-jerk ugly. Unfortunately, humans have a hard-wired tendency to be “tribal” -- most likely a holdover from when early humans had to band together to make it against the elements, wild animals, and other early humans. Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson writes in “Sociobiology” that xenophobia -- fear and hatred of outsiders -- “has been documented in virtually every group of (higher) animals.”

Yes, The Naked Ape is now a college sophomore with text messaging: “Got geisha?” Translation: “Here you are, selfishly pursuing your own happiness over the comfort of friends, acquaintances, and web-trolling strangers.” It doesn’t have to be that way. The sooner you dump your girlfriend, the sooner people will stop assuming you’re an Asian fetishist and start assuming you’re a girlfriendless loser. Of course, this won’t open their tiny little minds. Your best shot at that is letting them get to know you and your girlfriend. This takes focusing on what’s really important -- not whether people believe you love her but simply that you do. Ultimately, even if college isn’t quite the higher learning experience you thought it would be, with your girlfriend around, at least you won’t have to remember it solely as “Pee-wee’s Bigot Adventure.”

My story starts out like your typical made-for-TV movie, with my husband cheating on me with a mutual acquaintance: I wailed, I calmed down, I died a little inside from feelings of worthlessness. After much reflection, I realized the cheating was a symptom of a problem in our relationship, not the problem itself. After sincere apologies from my husband, we began talking as husband and wife for the first time. But, my story takes a nasty turn: I can’t stop going ape on him. Although the acquaintance fled to another city, when images of them pop into my brain, or if he’s two seconds late, I become this spurting volcano of hate. I feel I’m spoiling our recovery with these outbursts, but I don’t want him to start feeling this wasn’t that big of a deal.

Some people do their best thinking while driving. Others wait for answers under the shower or on the pot. Each to his or her own and all that, but just wondering -- are you really at your analytical prime while screaming at the top of your lungs, chasing your husband around the dining room table, and trying to bludgeon him to death with a turkey leg?

Greetings, Spurting Volcano Of Hate! Perhaps you’ve heard that venting anger will make it go away. It won’t. Anger begets anger. It also makes you stupid. Extreme emotional stress unleashes a chemical reaction called the “fight or flight” response, shutting down all systems except those you’d need to either club somebody or run like hell. Sure, this was an extremely helpful survival tool for our ancestors in the cave. And, in some ways, it’s still the perfect response -- for any woman married to a troubled leopard or a tribe of cannibals.

Your husband did pledge to be faithful to you. Oops, maybe he crossed his fingers! As upsetting as that must be, be honest: Is it his infidelity alone that turned you into the Denny’s of rage (no time’s the wrong time for a Grand Slam!), or does it have more to do with the head-on collision of reality and your expectations? Wham, bam, like a moose carcass through your rose-colored windshield, suddenly it’s all in your face: He’s human, he’s fallible, he isn’t the tower of ethics you closed your eyes and hoped he’d be. Stop erupting and start thinking, and you might acknowledge a few equally discomforting things about marriage; like, that it isn’t a simple solution to all life’s problems, but a whole new set of problems -- accessorized with a pornographically expensive set of china.

Sure, it’s easier to storm around picturing him naked with her -- which has to leave him picturing you fully clothed with a Home Depot salesman, pricing a nail gun and a couple of two-by-fours. By raging endlessly, you’re doing what he did, just without the sex -- avoiding the real issue, which is figuring out how to be married. But, first things first. Figure out whether you want a marriage more than you want revenge. If you’re up for a rebuild, stop screaming, start talking, and get reading -- “Surviving Infidelity” by Rona Subotnik and Gloria G. Harris and “How to Control Your Anger Before It Controls You” by Albert Ellis and Raymond Chip Tafrate. When you sense an explosion coming on, take deep breaths and think positive: Crazy as it seems, his affair could be the thing that saves your marriage. Yes, who knew? Maybe what it takes for you to live happily ever after is not the mythical perfect man but the real-life perfect floozy.