Don’t talk to me about love. I wrote the book on it. Literally.

And for that sin, I alone am escaped to tell you the tale of the Battle of the Sexes and the End of Man.

Okay, that’s not quite accurate. The book wasn’t really about love. But it was about dating, and lust, and sex, and how to facilitate all of that. And there was enough sin to go around - if that girl hadn’t broke my heart, I’d never have written it.

See, the dating game had always been a strange affair.

Like viruses, men were constantly attacking the courtship immune systems of women with such silly lines as “Are those spacepants you’re wearing? Cos your ass is outta this world” (field studies suggest a 33% success rate) or R. Kelly’s immortal “You remind me of my jeep…”(ending withheld). Women had learned to expect very little wit or charm or indeed good sense from the Y-chromosomed sex.

But I cracked it. I figured out the Secret.

It took me years and years of intense study, surveying the whole of human (or male, at least) knowledge, of trying out lines and building my body and working on my poses and doing pretty much whatever it took. And I’d never have done it if she hadn’t broke my heart.

So I wrote the Book. It gave men who read it the skills necessary to stand out from the pack. Pick-up lines better than anything ever told before. A sense of fashion that women might actually admire. The necessary knowledge to develop any kind of body they desired.

So...what happens if you take expert knowledge of what actually works on the fairer sex and you put it into the hands of the kind of guys who actually go up to random women and try them out?

Mutually assured destruction.

Suddenly, the bar was raised.

Women became accustomed to a better class of pickup, and suddenly those males with a more limited wit or charm couldn’t get by. The fairer sex expected more from us, and The Game needed to develop to keep up….so more and more men bought my book, and learned the Secrets, and applied them to more and more women, raising their expectations in turn, forcing more men to buy the book, and...you get the idea.

Before you knew it, humanity was trapped in an ever-accelerating arms race. For each new line or pickup style, women evolved the defense that comes with familiarity. Men had to develop new styles, ever more powerful - and women, in turn, developed defenses to those new moves.

Soon, female expectations were so high that men could no longer meet them (let’s be honest, men were hideous creatures and only had so much potential to work with anyway…).

And of course, there had always been a large percentage of women on whom The Secret didn’t work at all, or even acted negatively - women repulsed by the art of the pick-up, who perhaps preferred guys who were more quiet and reserved, or wanted to be able to have some time to themselves without running into a male looking to get into their pants. They, too were unhappy - how else could they feel in a world full of ever-more-annoying males hitting on them?

Woman had had enough...and they decided to do something about it.

They met in secret to discuss the situation, in quiet spaces where men would never think to look for them, and they looked at it from every angle. And ultimately, they reached their decision: they could do without us men around.

Suddenly females severed all contact with the dumber and less attractive half of the population, and conventional reproduction ground to a halt.

It was a while before we guys noticed. Men still turned up in droves to bars and clubs and cruises and coffee shops and so on, hoping to find women on which to try out their latest pick-up lines, or show off their muscles, or whatever other strategy they’d worked out. And we drank and we danced and we postured, and we preened, and we flexed, and we fought...and went home alone, with the vague notion that something was different.

In the meantime, the ladies had been spending their time more productively. They created secret research labs, conducted tests, devised a way to reproduce without the involvement of the sillier sex. And then they left.

Without being constantly distracted by annoying males, women were able to devise miraculous technology, creating for themselves an artificial continent. They kept it to themselves, cloaking it from Man’s eyes and creating a society of peace and love. And to add insult to injury, they called it Paradise Island.

And the men left behind grew ever wilder and crazier. With no women around, they didn’t know what to do with themselves. They gymmed harder, and insulted each other’s pick-up lines, and  fought more.

And one day an angry, angry man found himself with his finger on a red button. And another man insulted him, and he grew even angrier, and he pressed the button. And the bombs rose into the air. And seeing this, other men with other buttons pressed them, and more and more bombs rose.

And then they fell, all around the world, except for Paradise Island, which could not be touched.

And so Man passed away from memory, and Woman inherited the Earth.

But a group of female historians used their advanced technology to rescue one male from all the devastation. One man, who had witnessed the Fall of Man and could record the story for future generations (of women, naturally). One man, who was in some ways responsible for the end of the old world, and the rise of the new.

I’m that guy, by the way.

I wrote the book of love.

And I’d never have done it if she hadn’t broken my heart.

Ah, well.