It all started in high school, when we all sat around with our best girl friends trying to figure out what exactly we wanted from boys. It came down in those days to three attributes: He had to be cute, nice and smart. He didn't even really have to be smart. And so, knowing little of the monster we had just given birth to, we begat "The List". It has become, for many of us, the end to carefree dating.

The List is that itemization, that shopping guide by which we begin in our earliest days of co-mingling with the opposite sex, to select suitable partners. When we were mostly dateless yet hopeful, we had time to sit around with our equally dateless friends and describe at great length "the perfect guy". At that point, unblemished by dating failure, we all figured we wouldn't take anything less than him. Of course, in those days, our requirements were simple, our needs primitive. In those days, all he had to be was "cute".

When we were 14, "cute" to us was a virtue so praiseworthy. "Nice", the second place category in our program, was a term as widely applied but not always to the same object of our affections. We all wanted the cute boys to be sure, but if he could be "cute" and yet "nice", at the same time, well, this was about as close to actual sainthood as we could bestow on a four-foot-11-inches peer.

Later, those few girl friends who were dating assured the rest of us that we wanted the boy to be "smart". This did not mean erudite, exactly. It just meant he could string sentences together so they added up to a cogent thought. This was more rare in high school than you might think. The girls who were dating seemed to have all the answers, and so those of us on the sidelines decided we too wanted our (eventual) boyfriends to be "smart".

And so we mulled these characteristics over at all the slumber parties and school dances and club meetings and football games, and even though we went out with boys who were neither cute nor nice nor smart (in fact most of us were not in a position to turn anyone down), we continued to look for the boy with the three things that comprised "The List".

I think it was in our mid-20s that "The List" started to grow. By then, we'd actually made love (most of us), had had long-term relationships (defined as anything over two months), and met men from beyond our communities. In our new-found maturity, we added to the list a sense of humor, something I appropriated from a friend's list and which spread like wildfire onto the lists of all my peers.

List items expanded. He had to have nice hands. He had to like jazz, or classical music or whatever kind of music we favored at that point in time. He had to be "like" us in fact; he had to like animals if we did, ski or scuba dive if we did, be politically motivated if we were. He had to like to camp or travel or read or see movies. At this juncture in our lives, we were looking for companions who would be with us 100 percent of the time, whom we would probably marry, with whom we'd be locked in love forever. It would be impossible to divorce, we assured each other sagely, if he were all those things on the list. A serious understatement might be that this turned out not to be true.

We learned through our 20s and into our 30s that even though the men we selected might have most of the qualities on the list, they, being human, could always baffle us by manifesting some quirk that we quickly added to a new companion list of things a mate could not be. He was cute, but he cheated on you. He was athletic, but he chewed his own toenails.

He was nice, but he had 18 odorous friends, all of whom spent Sundays at your place. He loved you, but he hated your family, all your friends, your job and your haircut. He was brilliant academically, but still an undergraduate, seven years after his classmates had graduated.

The list grew. In our 30s, it was now becoming a lengthy document, covered with erasures and modifications, but mostly additional entries, not a one would we delete. Now, not only did he have to be cute, nice and smart, with a sense of humor, he had to be faithful, honest, open, easy to talk to, athletic, good body, good job, polite, politically aware, well-read, well-groomed, well-off, happy with himself, like his family and yours, enjoy your friends, and if at all possible, he had to like to dance (the expendable item since it's been found, statistically speaking, to be nearly impossible to find an acceptable man who likes to dance…).

He could not: Be married, still seriously attend Grateful Dead concerts, reminisce about high school or college, wonder what he wanted to do with his life, be paunchy, curse (or sleep with) old girl friends, or belch loud enough to shake the window panes in an attempt to impress his friends.

And we wonder why we remain single?

As women approach 40, one sees a re-evaluation in the trend toward the multi-page list. As the years multiply and the men seem to disappear in a direct relation to each other, we look at our lists more critically. Items which were once sacrosanct now seem like luxuries. We see a way to happiness if only he's cute, nice, smart, unmarried, and heterosexual.

After all these years of collecting items for our lists, sharing them with our girl friends, modifying them through good and bad affairs of our own and reports on the successful marriages of certain National Enquirer subjects, we'll eventually revert, humbly, to the same lists we started when were 14 years old. "Cute, nice, and smart." Just as we compromise on the Jaguar, buying the Camry, or choose the long weekend upstate over the two week cruise in the Greek Isles, we ultimately give up what we really don't need - which, truly, in my opinion, is the way it ought to be.

This is not to say I'm ready or willing to give up anything quite yet. I'm still at an age that my list, a bound series of volumes, not unlike or fewer in number than the Encyclopedia Britannica, remains somewhat secure.

But you know, I'd pare it down to a single Post-It note if only I could find that one mythical man, the one, long-dreamt-of, gift-to-woman: that guy who (Lord help me), likes to dance…

The above article, copyright Debra C. Victoroff, was published in 1997 in the Staten Island Advance and has been reproduced on this web site with the author's permission.