SWF seeks an out of shape, weekend binge drinking man-child that still goes to KISS concerts and cannot kick his comic book reading habit well into his forties. Must be choked by the umbilical cord of an Irish mother and live in a state of perpetual Irish Catholic guilt that flares up when he misses Mass on Sunday or lingers too long on at a nasty corner of the World Wide Web. Lasting three minutes in the sack mandatory; five minutes a plus. 

Good God.

My 12-year-old is just beginning to show a slight interest in boys, and since it’s every man’s dream to have their little princess marry a guy just like their father, I’m trying to craft a personal ad to attract the ideal candidate.

If you’re savvy enough to have found this online, you already know that no one goes to the bar to meet a mate nowadays. It’s all done via the computer, and as I prepare for my daughter’s online dating debut I find that I have a problem -- I am both repulsed and horrified by the profile that is emerging.

Who the heck would want me? Then again, the kid could do worse.

Like many fathers, I have a recurring nightmare that my daughter’s prom date will pick her up in a late model convertible with a Confederate flag painted on the hood, the wind having its way with his raging bleached blonde mullet as he rounds the corner of our cul-de-sac.

He’ll ring the bell, offer me a SKOAL pack from a tin that makes a permanent round impression in the back pocket of his powdered blue tuxedo, and reassure me of his love for my child by hiking up his pant leg and showing me a tattoo of my kid’s name on his calf.

I sometimes wonder what kind of guys are going to come-a-calling to our house, and while I’m not sure I’d really want a mirror image of myself on the doorstep, I’d like to think that my involvement in my daughters’ creation and formation will create loving women that will be able to differentiate between the nice guys and the jerks.

John Mayer is right about many things, like when he sang the lines “fathers be good to your daughters/daughters will love like you do/girls become lovers that turn into mothers” in his hit “Daughters.”

Long before I first heard that song, I was completely present to the fact that I was going to be the blueprint for every relationship my girls would have with the opposite sex. It definitely played out when my wife married me, and I studied the parallels between our marriage and the relationship with my wife and her father carefully over the years.

Though I was not a brilliant Jewish oncologist who compulsively cheated the house at some poker table within the bowels of Caesar’s Palace casino, there were undeniable similarities in our love for puns, waking up in Manhattan, The New York Times Sunday paper, and the intense devotion and respect for the woman I married.

I would like to think my girls would have learned a lot about relationships from watching my wife and I interact with one another. They have hopefully learned that being married to your best friend keeps your hair from going prematurely grey, using the “inside voice” at all times gets you a lot farther than yelling, and that winning an argument at all costs rarely feels good the next morning.

They’ve probably figured out by now that if two college sweethearts invest the energy into keeping one another intellectually, emotionally and sexually stimulated, it is possible to build a nurturing household that will support loving human beings two decades later.

I’m not so vain as to think that anyone other than my wife will find my aura hot, but I do know that they could do a lot worse than me in the boyfriend department.

And hey, if their boyfriend happens to be a pudgy man child that wears a vintage KISS t-shirt when he picks up my little girl, I will look into the heavens and wink at my maker.