Sure, your girlfriend seems to like you—she constantly tells you she loves you, she spoils you with sex, she bought you a hi-def plasma TV for Easter. But how can you know how she really feels? How can you be sure it’s not all an elaborate act? She could very well just be using you—for your mediocre sexual ability, for the 400 dollars in your checking account, for your extensive collection of rare pornography. Here are some simple ways to smell out a rat.

1. Lie About an Illness
   

   Tell your girlfriend you have some rare disease that will leave you a mere shadow of the man she claims to have fallen for. For example, tell her your penis has become badly infected and the doctors say your only chance of survival is to have the whole deal chopped off. “I’m afraid it may affect our sex life,” tell her. How she reacts to this news will indicate her true feelings for you.

   Read more in Life

   « 10 Ways to be Retarded

   Five Reasons You Keep Being Slapped »

   If she laughs derisively at you, then she may not really be the girl of your dreams after all. If she packs a bag and says she’s going to the store to get some soy milk, I’m afraid you’ll never see her again. She’ll probably just leave the soy milk quietly on your doorstep and skip town forever. If she gives a big sigh of relief when you tell her, it means she’s glad that she’ll no longer have to endure your clueless sexual groping.  

   If, on the other hand, she tells you it’s okay, she’ll stay with you, it’s no big deal, she loves you with penis or without, then you should still dump her immediately. A girl who sees the loss of her boyfriend’s penis as only a minor inconvenience probably wasn’t too crazy about having sex with him in the first place. And that won’t do. Your girlfriend should love having sex with you, no matter how miserable an experience it might be for her.  

   What you want is for your girlfriend to be totally devastated when she hears that a bunch of doctors want to cut off your manhood. If she really does like you, she’ll say something like, “No! Anything but that! Let them take your brain, your heart, your legs—anything in the world but that wonderful dick!”

   And think how happy she’ll be when you tell her your penis isn’t infected after all. She’ll be like a little girl in a candy store, who learns that her future boyfriend isn’t going to have his penis cut off after all. You may even choose to break the news to her in a candy store. But that is a private matter I will leave up to you.

2. Fake Your Own Death and Observe Your Girlfriend’s Behavior

   Doing this is easier than one might imagine. Just toss some of your personal effects into a nearby creek or estuary—a pair of monogrammed underwear, a wallet full of old identification—and wait for the local media to pronounce you dead. Should take no longer than six months, at the very most.

   Pay close attention to how your girlfriend gets on without you. Does she mope listlessly around the house, or does she throw wild pagan parties that celebrate your death? Does she make a bedroom shrine of your old belongings before which she cries and masturbates every night? Or does she sell them on eBay and use the money to buy dope from her new dealer boyfriend?

   You might also want to set up an empty-casket funeral service just so you can see what kind of eulogy your girlfriend would give you. If she describes you as a “simple man,” or a “kind soul,” then sorry, pal, she never really liked you. If she remembers you as a “bedroom virtuoso” or a “haunted genius who also knew his way around a vagina,” then you’re in luck. She was crazy about you.

   But either way, you should emerge from the back of the funeral hall dramatically at the end of her speech, to the astonishment of all present. “He lives! The dead boy lives!” an old woman will proclaim, just before swooning. This will give you the perfect opportunity to cut your girlfriend’s ass if her eulogy was no good, or propose to her if it expressed a sufficient amount of horny longing. I can’t tell you how many guys in my family have proposed to their girlfriends at their own fake funerals. It’s really a beautiful thing to see.

3. Tell Her You Cheated On Her
   

   This is another easy way to get a read on your girlfriend’s true feelings.

   If she says it’s too painful to imagine you being with another woman and she can’t stay with you, then congratulations—the girl really loves you. If she says it’s okay, she forgives you, and stays around, then you might as well get rid of her. She doesn’t care about you enough to want you all to herself. If she finds the news so devastating that she takes her own life, then, my friend, you have found your soulmate, the girl for whom life is meaningless without you. Too bad she’s gone forever.

4. Tempt Her With Other Men
   

   This admittedly unscrupulous tactic is a quick way to test your girlfriend’s fidelity. And a girl wouldn’t cheat on you if she really loved you.

   Send a male escort to her apartment and watch what happens from the shrubs outside. If there are no shrubs by your girlfriend’s apartment, then I don’t know what to tell you. You probably shouldn’t be dating her in the first place. I guess you could give her a big potted plant for her garden and then hide behind that. If she starts sleeping with the guy, then bang on the window and tell her it’s over. In my experience, you may have to yell really loudly in order to be heard over the wild sounds of their turbulent sex.

   I remember one time I sent an escort to a girlfriend’s house and got myself settled in the bushes outside. But before the escort gets there, a Domino’s pizza guy pulls up. He drops off the three pies—no wonder she was putting on so much weight—and then she takes him inside and starts having sex with him. I was too shocked even to interrupt them. And plus, I had already paid for the male escort, and I wasn’t gonna let all that money go to waste. After the Domino’s guy leaves, another car pulls up. Oh, I think to myself, this must be the escort. Wrong. It’s the milkman, evidently, or at least some guy in a uniform who brings my girlfriend a gallon of milk before he screws her brains out. Finally, after this second guy leaves, the escort shows up. But by now my girlfriend is too tired to entertain him, though I can tell she still wants to. So I wasted three hundred dollars on the escort after all. Moral of the story: be wary of delivery men.  

   If you’re not comfortable with the possibility of your girlfriend sleeping with another guy, then you could just disguise yourself as another guy and try to seduce her. The problem with this is that your girlfriend could just say she knew it was you all along. She was just joking when she moaned, “Oh, Rodrigo, Rodrigo, take me!” And also when she said, “God, you’re just as terrible in bed as my loser boyfriend.”

So if your girlfriend passes all these tests—if she resists professional sex workers, gives you a decent eulogy, falls apart when she hears that your penis is going to be chopped off, and is shattered by the false news of your infidelity—then there is indeed a chance that she likes you. Congratulations. But I still wouldn’t bank on it. Because let’s be honest, why in the world would any right-minded girl go for a guy like you?