column: Frankie #10 Apr/May 2006

20 ways to impress your love interest

You may have been seeing your love interest for years; you may be seeing them only through the means of a small, illegal video device. Be that as it may, these techniques will impress upon that person the degree of your emotional investment. Go forth and cherish the moment!

1. Turning up unexpectedly at their house is not impressive; it’s just a surprise. Turning up unexpectedly in the boot of their car, however, is impressive. While you are hiding, remain fixed with an over-sized smile and two thumbs up, eagerly awaiting the moment you are found.

2. Systematically go through all your love interest’s photo albums. Draw a crude smiley face into all the photos.

3. Later explain that the face is you.

4. Keep loose food items in your pockets to offer to your love interest — biscuits, candies, tuna in brine. Wait for an appropriate moment — say, while they’re driving — then push your tight fist of tuna towards them, screaming, “Take it! Just take it!”

5. Swap your love interest’s existing mouse pad for a customised mouse pad — one with your face attached to the body of a small dog.

6. Draw hands onto the dog so that it appears to be giving two thumbs up.

7. Repeatedly send a text message to your love interest that reads, “So. What are you doing now?” Initially, send at intervals of an hour. Progressively shorten the intervals to ten minutes.

8. Then five.

9. Then send a smiley.

10. Wayne Thompson, one of Cleo’s 50 Eligible Bachelors, says that in order to impress his love interest, he would buy her “a flower”. Weak. What Wayne, like many others, clearly does not realise is that flowers are free and in abundance. So are glasses of water. So are used tea-towels. So is asbestos. Do you give any of these to your love interest? No. Because they’re cheap and useless. A gift to impress your love interest should be bold and expensive. In the film Monkey Shines, Alan receives a monkey that makes him sandwiches and dials phone numbers and vacuums the carpet. Granted, the monkey later kills Alan’s mother and burns down Stanley Tucci’s country house with him in it, but the point was that Stanley Tucci was sleeping with Alan’s ex-girlfriend, who only left Alan because he had become a paraplegic, and what’s Stanley Tucci doing now? Shall We Dance. Sure, it was a great film, but I don’t even think he was getting top billing. The point, I think, is obvious: a bold and expensive gift — in this case, a monkey — leaves an impression.

11. Consider also the delivery of any gift. Say, for example, you were to give your love interest a trained chimp, as in Monkey Shines — why idly present it over dinner when you could trap it their house for them to find at a later date?

12. Remember that a chimp could fit snugly in a bean bag.

13. Or a Vac Pack.

14. Whenever you eat with your love interest, keep an eye out for pieces of food that look like them. If you find one — say, a bean — pick it out.

15. Fashion a small chair for the bean from your serviette.

16. Pet it throughout the meal.

17. Throw a brick into the window of your love interest’s workplace. Tie a note to the brick that reads, “So. What are you doing now?”

18. Scan a photo of your love interest and a photo of yourself. Morph the two faces digitally and draw in a child’s body.

19. Set it as their desktop background.

20. Set it to tiled.

21. Blair McDonough from Neighbours says that if he had five dollars, he would buy his love interest “an ice-cream and a ride on a roller coaster”. I like the way Blair thinks. Fill your love interest with a dairy product and then pay to have their body violently shaken. Although Blair is clearly trying, his idea is, at best, repulsive. Instead, with five dollars, he could have bought his love interest a fibre supplement. Impress your love interest by keeping them regular.

Note: this article also appears in the literary anthology What is Our Sex?, published by Vignette Press and launched at This is Not Art 2007.