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I have never kissed a man at a bar. It’s not because I’m kiss-shy or fear oral herpes or am germaphobic (though all these things are true). It’s because I am allergic to peanuts, and there are peanuts at bars — grimy baskets of peanuts — surrounded by tipsy, hungry people, filling their hands and mouths with peanuts, drinking alcohol, chomping on some more peanuts, then sliding those peanut-covered palms under the backs of nearby blouses, and stuffing their tongues between the lips of open-mouthed, intoxicated companions. Oh how I would love to participate, but one such kiss would send me into anaphylactic shock. Yes, I am talking about the Kiss of Death. You probably don’t realize it, but pretty much every stage of dating from kiss to consummation is gift-wrapped with nuts.
Thus, I want to tell you the story of my dating life with Nutman, a composite of past boyfriends. Rest assured, you are not missing out: I always date the same personality, so Nutmen one through six are suspiciously similar characters. Let’s start with the first meeting. New York City is dotted with low-key, literary-themed lounges, and they are filled with bookshelves, couches and cute, tall, semi-nerdy future Nutmen. I often go, and once a month a Nutman appears. We hit it off. Nutman accordingly makes every effort to touch my bare skin, which he learned from reading The Game or something similar. His fingers innocently skim my hand or forearm, stroke the small of my back, or reach out to brush my cheek. But we’re sitting feet from the germy bowl of nuts, and what Nutman considers the touch of lust is actually the touch of hives. I place a table or chair arm or railing between us, and spend my evening dodging his fingers while sipping vodka and cranberry, a mixed drink guaranteed not to have some hidden essence of peanut like that trendy Castries Peanut Rum Crème, the killer ingredient of adventurous bartenders everywhere. We chat, and after a while Nutman realizes that because he has yet to touch me, we’re probably not going home together tonight. So he suggests a future dinner, inquiring what sort of food I like. This is where I’m supposed to indicate in two sentences that I’m both cultured and adventurous. Instead, I explain that I don’t eat foods that are brown. Nor do I eat foods that are prepared with the same utensils as peanuty foods, such as stir-fry (same wok as Pad Thai) or cookies (same pan as peanut-butter cookies). Nor "combo" foods like chicken pot pie or stews, where peanuts can be easily mixed in. Nor foods with shells, like the nutty cheese rinds of France, nor pies with crusts. Nor pesto anything. Nor crunchy foods. I eat individual, non-topped items of non-crunch consistency, where all the ingredients are visible, such as a hunk of meat and green beans, or grilled cheese on white. It’s a science. But I don’t mention these details to Nutman. After a few hours, we relocate to a party at someone’s apartment, where nut peril reigns. Cashews fly through the air as guests try to catch the mini-grenades of death in their mouths. The pot-laced brownies are probably also laced with peanut butter or walnuts. The sugar cookies share a plate with tarts of indeterminate content. Bowls of chips sit next to the peanut-butter cookies; I gauge the probability of peanuty fingers having touched the chips (quite high). A host heats up nachos, but did she heat up the Chinese leftovers in the same microwave? All I know is that it’s 2 a.m., and I’m famished.
Nutman pops a peanut-butter cookie and any chance of making out tonight instantly evaporates. I eye a tempting pile of munchies in the kitchen — homemade not-brown cookies and store-bought banana bread. Nutman will soon witness me roaming the crowd to find the drunken cookie chef to ask about the ingredients; I try to ascertain whether she’s sober enough for me to risk my life on her memory of the day she baked. Or Nutman will find me, head and arms deep inside the kitchen trash receptacle, searching for the ingredient list of that banana bread. But Nutman won’t ask what the hell I’m doing — he is apparently used to label-conscious women. He just assumes that I’m a wee bit paranoid about my waistline. As the night draws to a close, my choices are to gently explain to Nutman that I can’t kiss him because he’s a walking plague, or to risk one tongue swap, which could result in that unfortunate scratchy feeling at the back of my throat, followed by speedily swelling eyes and lips and a friend shrieking, "ARIANNE’S HAVING AN ATTACK! CALL 911!" I opt for an awkward hug. I am supposedly not alone: Approximately 2% of Americans are allergic to peanuts, and like all our issues, we can blame it on our mothers. Babies are first exposed to peanuts through breast milk, and mothers who don’t eat peanuts don’t have allergic kids. The trouble comes when fetuses’ undeveloped immune systems detect peanuts eaten by the mother, perceive them as deadly invaders and turn on a whopping immune-system response that’s potentially deadly itself, better known as anaphylactic shock. My mother’s pregnancy binge food was peanut butter. More and more people share the peanut dating-disaster lifestyle. I know this because The New England Journal of Medicine recently justified my kissing fears with a study showing that allergic people can and do have life-threatening reactions from kissing, sometimes simply because the kissee had recently brushed their teeth. I also have the keyword "peanut" tagged on various news searches, and my email regularly dings with news articles relating the ever-doubling numbers of peanut allergies. I always want to email the reporter and say, "Idiot, the numbers are growing because the kids used to just die. Now they’re alive to be counted." So my allergy is a relatively common one. But I still try to avoid bringing it up for three or four dates, because I don’t want it to be my calling card. And it feels like a kind of weakness, a blemish associated with poor health that somehow doesn’t fit into the image of overflowing fertility that I’m supposed to be. I worry that upon finding my Epi-Pen stash, Nutman will be triggered into a primal reaction: "She’s allergic to nuts! She won’t bear strong children who can survive the winter! Me must run!" Granted, this has never happened. But still.
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