Small Law Firms

Want To Date A Lawyer? Here’s How To Turn One On (Outside The Bedroom)

Congratulations and apologies if you are successful.

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Want to date a lawyer? Here’s how to attract one.

  1. Love RBG.

Some people love God, family, and country, in that order. Lawyers worship Ruth Bader Ginsburg above all else. Kneel at the altar of Notorious RBG with us while wearing matching T-shirts with her face on them. Worry with us about her health as if the welfare of the free world depends on it (which it might). Watch the two movies about her on repeat with us and let’s marvel together about her incredible work ethic, vigorous dissents, and impressive fitness routine.

  1. Employ our favorite key phrases regularly.

Please don’t whisper sweet nothings in our ears. Don’t tell us we look pretty or that you like our new haircut. Instead, if you really want to rev our engines, try using these two phrases as often as possible: “You were right.” and “Whatever you want.” They work in basically any context and will always elicit a positive reaction, unless the latter phrase is in response to a question about what to have for dinner when we don’t really have an opinion one way or the other and need a definitive answer. In that instance, there may be hell to pay. Proceed with caution.

  1. Pleasantly surprise us.

To be a lawyer is to be in a constant state of bracing for disappointment. Indeed, many of us have jobs in which someone else is hired by another party just to make sure we lose. We converse in the language of pessimism with a fluency boasted only by native speakers. Give a client an inkling that there is a reason to have hope, and you may be opening a Pandora’s box of failed expectations. And since we are trained to expect the worst, in our relationships, when someone goes above and beyond, we notice.  It doesn’t matter if you simply brought us cheese when we didn’t expect cheese, or if you booked a reservation at our favorite restaurant for no occasion in particular. But anticipate that we will not be that great at verbally expressing our appreciation. We are only good at interpersonal communication when we are billing someone for it.

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  1. Wallow in our chaos.

At any given time, there is some aspect of a lawyer’s life that is completely falling apart. These days, for example, I seem to be able to keep my house tidy for about six minutes after cleaning it, which only occurs after I know for sure that guests are coming over. I consider myself only a part-time owner of a cat, since quite often she is buried under a pile of sweaty gym clothes, and only can be detected by faint mews for help. If you want to get into a lawyer’s, ahem, good graces, do yourself a favor and ignore the fact she has, say, a collection of 10-to-15 half-empty bags of tortilla chips scattered about her kitchen and pantry. Or that, to save money in winter and because she is never home, she only heats one room in the house and accordingly wears parkas and leopard-print earmuffs to watch TV. Do not pass judgment or even acknowledge the issues. These are only signs that the rest of her life is totally together. Odds are she’s even getting along fabulously with her mother.

  1. Don’t be a lawyer yourself, probably.

I only dated a lawyer once, briefly. It ended over a misunderstanding involving a movie about puppets. But I can imagine that, over the long term, having two lawyers end up together would probably cause the Earth to explode in a cacophony of self-aggrandizement, over-analysis, and the inability of either party to admit fault, even with a settlement agreement in place. All joking aside, I know that many lawyers marry other lawyers and even make little baby eventual lawyers. (I’m looking at you, Ruth and Martin.) But how it ever works will remain a mystery to me on par with what happens in the afterlife and whether I get to hang out with Grandma Taylor when I get there.

  1. Be on time most of the time.

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For lawyers, time is literally money. We respect the value of time almost as much as we respect RBG. We particularly respect the value of our free time, because it is finite and does not (usually) involve phone calls and emails threatening us with lawsuits. When you chronically show up late — even if you let us know ahead of time, after we’ve already woken up from our nap and started getting ready — it tells us that you don’t respect our time. We don’t care that your Uber driver missed the exit. When you show up on time — especially with unexpected cheese — we will start doodling our first name with your last name over and over with hearts all around in our notebooks during chemistry class. (Just kidding. We aren’t changing our surnames if we marry anyone, even if RBG did.)

  1. Be a partner, not a caretaker.

We don’t need you to open our car doors for us or carry our grocery bags. We have two hands and a gym membership to a fitness center that includes free weights and boot camp classes. We’ve spent our careers solving other people’s problems and handling crises; we don’t need you to kiss our owies and tell us that everything is going to be okay. We just need you to suffer through grocery shopping and other adult obligations with us as a team of equally miserable human beings. The exception is that we will be needy, germy meat-sacks while sick.

  1. Challenge us.

Here, I’m not talking about constantly debating stuff because you think lawyers want to argue all the time or teasing us about our pantsuits. I’m referring to keeping us on our toes with new adventures and thoughtful discussions. Lawyers somehow manage to get bored and get boring easily. Avoid complacency for both of us and we will stay interested longer than a drawn-out lawsuit with genuine issues of material fact. And also challenge us by not putting up with all of the classic lawyer baggage we bring to the table, like how we forget that the rest of the world keeps spinning even when we have a big deadline or a stressful project, or how we think we are smarter than everyone else. If you remind us that we are human we may be more likely to act like them.

So there you have it. My congratulations and apologies if you are successful.

Allison Peryea is a shareholder attorney at Leahy Fjelstad Peryea, a boutique law firm in downtown Seattle that primarily serves community association clients. Her practice focuses on covenant enforcement and dispute resolution. She is a longtime humor writer with a background in journalism and cat ownership. You can reach her by email at Allison.Peryea@leahyps.com.

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