Lena Katz: 

For the love of yourself and the sake of your current and future relationships, you must stop watching television. For at least a year. No HBO. No NBC. Not even the Animal Planet.

This entreaty is based on an unofficial survey of local dating patterns over the last few years — observations that lead me to believe television might lie at the root of all our problems. More specifically, TV characters — and our tendency to mimic them.

If I were to announce at a cocktail party that I was, say, the reincarnation of Queen Guinevere or the biological manifestation of Jane Eyre, people would think I was crazy. Intellectual, but crazy.

If, on the other hand, I were to say, “I really see myself as a Carrie Bradshaw,” everyone would know immediately what I was talking about.

And that is scary.

People have become so accustomed to “acting the part” that they actually become their favorite television characters — down to their fashion sense, speech and romantic tendencies. But this is doomed to fail, because life does not emulate TV. Regular people don’t have a costume budget, hotshot joke writers or, most important, a script supervisor to make sure everything turns out according to plan.

A man I recently dated used to watch “Entourage” obsessively. He would hang on Ari’s every overblown word, gesture, mannerism. Gradually, I began to notice bits of Ari and other characters manifesting themselves in this man’s life.

If you’re a fictional Hollywood hero with a huge bank account and a fully edited life, you live in a land of babes, threesomes, booty calls and urban cougars — and you can refer to them as such. But if you’re just an ordinary dude with an excess of bravado and an ability to parrot colloquialisms, you will be in big trouble.