Dear Backpage,

I feel like a dolphin caught in a six-pack ring. Thank Oceanus I have you guys. Anyway, this girl I’m into acts like I don’t even exist. We were partners in Encounters when we discussed Sartre, so I know she at least knows that. What should I do to get her to notice me? Plz halp.

Advicereciever69

Dear Advice Reciever69,

This is a classic case, one that actually dates to the OG couple: Adam and Eve. As we all know, those two rascals were the first humans, but Eve really wasn’t that interested in Adam. But hey, this was 4,000 years ago. Some revisionist writers have tried to claim that Eve was created “for Adam,” but that’s not what really happened. I learned this all by going through the Whitman Archives. Here’s how Adam got Eve’s attention:

Adam, being a typical heteronormative man, had a big crush on Eve. God had yet to tell Adam that gender was a spectrum. Adam fawned over Eve day and night, but she never even noticed his goat-like body among the trees of the beautiful and bountiful garden.

This was because Eve was a strong independent woman, and didn’t need a man to thrive. She preferred the company of mongooses and meerkats, and she got to know them all very well (not biblically of course!). She would gallivant with her furry pals and gather all the acorns in the garden and make a blazing fire to roast them by at night. This later served as inspiration for the hit television show “Meerkat Manor.” Adam, on the other hand, was stuck hanging out with toads in the swamp, eating over-ripe plantains and singing songs that hadn’t even been written yet. “One is the loneliest number,” he wept. All the toads could do was ribbit. But secretly they were laughing. “What a loser!” they spoke in their secret language that only amphibians could understand. His story would inspire the novel, “The Wind in the Willows.”

Adam realized he needed a plan. Unfortunately for Adam, it wasn’t Plan B. He was sick of his toad pals. First, he tried poetry.

“I am the lord’s ugliest creation –– compared to thee. I was made in God’s image, to be sure. But you make God look like my toad pals’ feces after they have too many flies.”

Eve wasn’t impressed.

“Don’t talk about poop when trying to woo a woman. This is day-one stuff, kid.”

Adam thought to himself, “It was actually the first day a few days ago,” but kept that to himself. Next, Adam tried to get super buff to impress Eve. He harvested creatine from the roots of the tallest tree in the forest and drank whey and ox milk right when he got up. One morning, he tried to steal eggs from the chickens who lived in Eden in order to ingest them raw. Adam then ralphed more than Kappas yak in Beta’s urinals, which is quite a bit. He even invented the wheel and flipped it on Eden’s version of Ankeny. He invented American football and made himself the quarterback, which made him look pretty cool, until a bear playing the position of defensive lineman nearly bit Adam’s gonads off in the bottom of a literal doggy pile. Eve and her furry friends just dismissed him as “dumb meathead TKE” (or at least the biblical version of that phrase).

Adam was flabbergasted. He had tried being sensitive and being buff. Was there no winning the woman he wanted?

In the end, Adam never won over Eve. It took them both eating the forbidden fruit and Eve losing all her mongoose friends to warm up to Adam.