Because last night we spoke to a womanizer who gave us the insightful advice that this is the time in your life to gaze into the eyes of people, until you start to blush, and take it from there.

This is your opportunity to explore emotions and relations, before you have your three kids and baking cookies in a house somewhere. (Loving it, of course.) Seeing that he is a networker deluxe, he jokingly suggested that he would start scouting interesting characters for us to get to know. Although slightly, utterly, resistant to look at love as a mission and a business, it got us thinking about what list of criteria we might present. Our only belief is that the universe knows better than we do regarding who we should be with, but naturally, we are aware of certain characteristics we value above others. By really narrowing it down, there are two main ones:

- Confident and utterly comfortable in yourself
- Intelligent humor (Filip & Fredrik, Ricky Gervais, Mitch Hedberg)

From there we could add a set of bonus traits:

- Handsome, beautiful, tall, dark
- Driven, entrepreneurial, a doer
- Passionate, about anything
- Kind, golden hearted
- Love making out
- Great dancer
- Swimmer, tennis or basketball player
- Curious
- Likes Billie Holiday, Al Green, Håkan Hellström
- Possibly diagnosed with adhd, or very talkative

If you feel that this applies to you, or if you know of fantastic men with these qualities, please let us know. We might have a completely inaccurate view of what we want, but we also know that trying and failing is a great way to learn.

Because we love men, and when they don't respond to our telecom-based text messages, we send them poems via regular mail instead. And because we believe that the digital world sometime lack the mental clarity and pureness of heart that comes with analog communication.

Because we love men and animals, men with animals, or simply all species. And at the library today we found a book that had us hooked in the preface, where the author, within the space of three pages, explain interspecie communication as well as offer a constructive take on how Swedes might view our new, undesired political situation with a xenophobic party entering the parliament;

I used to raise chickens and ducks for food. After a couple of years, a pack of coyotes discovered the easy meals, and I began to lose birds. I scared the coyotes away when I happened to be home, but I knew I could not forever stand guard. One day, when I saw a coyote stalking chickens I asked it to stop. I did this more out of frustration than conviction.
The odd thing was, the coyote did stop, and neither it nor other pack members returned.

/.../

As Franz Kafka put it, you may not destroy someone's world unless you are prepared to offer a better one. But no redemption can be found in avoidance of difficult issues. Redemption comes only after we have moved through the horrors of our present situation to the better world that lies beyond it. By confronting the problemas courageously as we can and at the same time presentling alternatives, our barriers to clarity, including our false hopes, may crumble to reveal previously unseen possibilities.

Excerpt from Derrick Jensen's A Language Older Than Words, 2004.

Because you are black-and-white men, smoking cigarettes and carrying paperbacks in your pockets, looking like models just by leaning against a wall. And because Jack Kerouac said; "Maybe that's what life is...a wink of the eye and winking stars.”

We went to a seminar earlier this summer that stated the importance of feeling suprised, because all to often we are caught in the same routines and think we know it all. Imagine our suprise then when Stockholm decides to throw us a record breaking make out evening with the most beautiful boy we ever kissed, a second man that charmingly picked us up while we were unlocking the bike, who we then gave a ride to Nybroviken (since it had to be romantic even though it was a 5am pick up) and while we are debating which place to go back to (His argument: "Det är ingen bra idé. Jag kommer ha ångest oavsett om vi går hem till dig, mig eller om jag vaknar själv i morgonbitti") a new acquaintance from the previous Wednesday night gives us a ring and wonders if he can come over. "Well, of course, see you in twenty minutes!" Turns out though, that mediocre things don't come easy. Seven (incoming) phone calls and two and a half hours later, he eventually shows up, having spoiled all chances of getting laid. Our hugs not drugs policy required an explanation, and resulted in a confession: apparently, taking your friend's ADHD medication slows down your mental capacity and clearly leads you to completely misinterpret the term booty call.

Needless to say, we woke up as the big winners. Or maybe it is just true, that blondes really do have more fun.

Speaking of the art of dressing well, the Sartoralist is pretty unrivaled when it comes to spotting the guys with flawless style.

2008 - two-thousand-great
2009 - two-thousand-fine (or divine, if you like)
2010 - two-thousand-men.

Amen.

I have a history of making decisions very quickly about men. I have always fallen in love fast and without measuring risks. I have a tendency not only to see the best in everyone, but to assume that everyone is emotionally capable of reaching his highest potential. I have fallen in love more times than I care to count with the highest potential of a man, rather than with the man himself, and I have hung on to the relationship for a long time (sometimes far too long) waiting for the man to ascend to his own greatness. Many times in romance I have been a victim of my own optimism.

— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

Although, we dissmissed this book as American-bestseller-chick-lit-crap at first, we soon came to appreciate its greatness, if not that of Miss Gilbert herself. One of the girls found it a suiting topic for a wintertime tea break, and as most things concerning optimism and romance, in our world it is timeless.

It is always amusing to realize how completely predictable we are. You just have to visit Stuff White People Like, to feel like the most unoriginal person in the world. Yet, instead of saying that we're completely unimaginative, we prefer to call it for what it is;
being children of of our time.

The most recent 'Aha'-experience of mainstream-ness came from Paste Magazine's Evolution of the Hipster spread. It lists the different gals and guys of the 21st Century's first decade and we couldn't have been provided with a more accurate inventory of our favorite boys;

2000 The Emo - check, check
2002 The Ashton - check
2004 The Twee - check
2006 The Mountain Man - check, check, check,
check, check, check, check, check, etc.
2008 The Williamsburg - check, check, check

The guy who forgot to mention that he had a girlfriend and later on kindly asked us to delete his phone number, gave us a call. We didn't recognize the number at first, and since we were sleeping at the time, 4am on a Saturday morning, we got a text as well, pretty much summing up the most relevant aspects. "Ute?".

"I don't play games like that. I'm completely single. I'm very intelligent. I'm great in bed. I make great money. Believe it or not, I'm a complete catch."

Modesty can sometimes be overrated, but psychological normal is not how we would describe the, among other issues, slightly passive aggressive Dimitri. Hear the full story here.

The man unbuttons his pink shirt and takes of his track suit pants.
- Do you have anything I can wear?
She hands him a pair of leopard leggings.
He sprawls across the bed in a pose that would make Ron Jeremy and any big cat proud. She starts to undress.
- No, wait. Would you mind putting that back on?
I watch so much porn that I really appreciate to actually see girls with their underwear on.

Imagine a company - top floor Soho office, always complimentary breakfast, sometimes beers and burgers in the afternoon, creative, inspiring and slightly crazy, converse-wearing people and staff competitions where you win round trip tickets within the continental US.

Now, imagine that a disproportionate amount of the employees are men in their most handsome years. Some skate, some bike, some fly airplanes to L.A. You could argue that it would be difficult to concentrate, but we work best in a stimulating environment.

The place exists, and although it might be an anomaly we have a crush on the entire bureau.

A combination of a few things we like: Yankees, 70's cops, scout scarves, male friendship, the scent of pine trees and tobacco, thickness of hair, coffee cups, calls of the wild, sheep skin furs, native American jewelry, denim shirts, cowboy hats, matches, beards in combination with sunglasses, beards in combination with moustaches, history, monochrome images, bare hands, men.