Reviewed by Brittany Burchett

Valentine’s Day is coming up, and the singles among us face a tough gig: navigating the awkwardness and the confusion of dating. Beware of Dogs! How to Avoid Dating Disasters, written by family therapist Barbara Hayes, seems like the perfect fit for that. The book is slim, and the front cover features a bulldog in sunglasses. All in all, you get the impression of a fun, easy read that will still give you a few good tips from a professional. That is not the case.

Each chapter of the book takes on a type of man or dating situation: Divorce; Younger Man; Narcissist, Abuser, and so on. This organizational scheme allows for a large degree of variation between chapters. In some chapters, Hayes’s advice is responsible and sound. She lists criteria for determining if a man is abusive, gives you tips on how to tell if a divorce is still too focused on his ex to make a good marriage partner, and advises you to stay away both from married men and all situations in which children are used as weapons by their divorced parents. Too many people get into these toxic situations, and Hayes is right to raise a red flag.

The rest I can only hope is a joke that falls flat. Certainly it could be; she tells us in the introduction that she intends for the book to be humorous. Her tone is surprisingly light and so it has the feel of a post-date debrief with a female friend. However, for every joke that succeeds, there are twice that that fail. This is because this is a book written for (heterosexual) female audiences – not for lesbians or bisexual women, and certainly not for men, of any orientation.  Gay men are reduced to the “gay best friend” stereotype. They all have the traits of a perfect boyfriend, but are sadly unavailable.

Straight men fared even worse. Hayes has no problem riding roughshod over men. She tells you that the sweet, sensitive, funny, manly type we see in movies does not exist, and intimates that finding a decent man is nearly impossible. Men are blamed for everything that goes wrong in a relationship. There is a pervasive sense of anger in the book, as though Hayes is flogging the male species in general because of her unsuccessful relationships with a few men.  Her lack of evenness, and her inability to share blame between the sexes, is disturbing.

Other offensive points abound. The step-parenting chapter advises you to run away from any situation involving stepchildren, which is a sad, all-or-nothing mindset. “The Usual Suspects” chapter is particularly mean-spirited, speculating about what people would be like as a friend or date based on what they look like while on the exercise machines at the gym. This is both pointless and cruel, lending nothing to the overall purpose of the book.

But her most offensive “advice,” especially coming from a therapist, comes in the chapter about the mentally ill. A surprisingly high percentage of people suffer from of mental illness to some degree, but they all still need social interaction and love. Mental illness is no more a reason to avoid dating someone than physical illness, and you’d expect Hayes to say that. Instead, she falls back on a medieval attitude of fear-mongering. She tells stories of scary men who stalk women and men who cannot maintain proper social interaction, which makes them incredibly boring dates. She addresses the how hard it is for women to deal with, for example, the screaming and wild mood swings of a bipolar man. This is not only an extreme picture, but an unfair one. Couples work together to figure many things out, including symptoms of illness. It’s a team effort, because mental illness requires a lot of support. It is extremely disappointing to see Hayes portray mentally ill men as antisocial beasts with no manners, who are borderline dangerous, a drag to take care of and cannot be trusted around the opposite sex.

In the end, Hayes’s advice boils down to this: run from all dating situations. She tells you to get a dog instead. My advice would be to run from Hayes’s book, and find somebody to offer you advice whose mind and heart are more open.

Brittany Burchett is a freelance writer for Boom!  She has written two novels and is looking for an agent. She can be reached at britt.burchett10@gmail.com.