Where to meet a quality guy?

Go to a bookstore, magazines tell us.

Start paying attention to the guys you interact with on a daily basis, chick flicks seem to scream at us.

You’ll never find a good man at a bar, self-help books criticize. Hang out at a local coffee shop.

But you know what’s funny? Every decent guy I’ve dated doesn’t drink coffee. Unfortunate for me as I drink more coffee than water, but I figure there’s water in coffee, so it can’t be that bad, right?

My point is, how often do you walk into a bookstore, coffee shop, grocery store, and get an invitation to dinner? That’s a rhetorical question. This does not happen.

Kitty’s a natural at good-man hunting. She sees potential at her parents’ Christmas parties, at the dentists office, in her neighbor’s former piano students. So when she spent the day at the local coffeeshop yesterday, she was perfectly aware of the cute guy who had been there for a few hours.

Kitty’s flaw? She never makes the first move. And as I pointed out earlier, guys at these places are rarely there to find a girl. So she was content to admire from afar and enjoy her book until closing time.

Then the unthinkable happened. As if straight from the script of a Meg Ryan movie, just as Kitty was packing up to go — her book was doggy eared and closed, she was putting on her coat — the cute guy walked into the room, sat down on the coach next to her and said, “Hey, what’s up?”

If this were a Meg Ryan movie, Kitty would have sat back down, they would have chatted until the owners kicked them out, he would have walked her home, asked her out to dinner, who knows.

But most of us (Kitty included) have discovered that life is not a chick flick, and great quality men in coffee shops do not introduce themselves with the intention of asking us out.

In this real-life scenario, Kitty was so thrown by the opening to fairytale land, so restricted by her rational thoughts of how she had to leave because the shop was closing, that she replied, “Oh hi, I was just leaving.” And she left. And then she tortured herself the rest of the night over what would have happened if she had stayed.

Don’t be fooled. Romance still exists. And while it may be rare to have a perfect stranger sit down and talk to a girl in a coffee shop, it could happen. You better believe it, or you might just ignore its existence when it’s right in front of you.