As a columnist for Brides magazine, I often encourage couples to personalize their weddings.

This is why.

I love that this small-town newspaper gave this wedding The New York Times Pentagon Papers treatment. I am now a fan of The Daily News Record in Harrisonburg, Va.

Last fall I posted a column in which I concluded that Robots Cannot Love. Turns out I was right - they can’t. But there’s an expert out there who thinks they’ll soon be able to make love.

If this robot is any indication, the love robots will be very popular with Europeans and astronauts.

I recently read an Associated Press story on how people are forming emotional attachments with their robots. The robot mentioned in the story was the Roomba, which is a vacuum cleaner developed by iRobot Corp.

Here is the lead from that story:

They give them nicknames, worry when they signal for help and sometimes even treat them like a trusted pet. A new study shows how deeply some Roomba owners become attached to the robotic vacuums, and suggests there’s a measure of public readiness to accept robots in the house – even flawed ones.

This story deals with human behavior, technology and love – a perfect topic for one of my columns. So I contacted iRobot and asked to speak with one of its spokespeople. I spent almost two weeks trying to make this happen. I even e-mailed my questions and asked a representative from the company to write me back.

All of my requests were rejected.

The media relations representative for iRobot wrote:

Hi Joe,

I received your questions and although this would make for a fun article, the iRobot team has declined to participate. I’ll be sure to keep you abreast of new product announcements and let you know if things change in the near future.

The first word that popped into my head when I read that was “cowards.” So many corporations are so spineless. It amazes me that people actually fear big business. But that’s a whole other column.

I wrote back:

I am sorry to hear that no one from iRobot will speak with me. This would have been a fun piece and I think it would have showed iRobot is hip and has a sense of humor. Clearly that is not the case. It appears to me that iRobot refuses to laugh. It refuses to enjoy existence. Almost like — a real robot. I can only conclude that the company is now run by a robot and that your spokesrobots are afraid I will expose them for what they are — humanoid beings with internal battery organs, blinking light eyes and monotone voices who lack the ability to enjoy life and want to punish humans for our irrational emotion-feelings by taking control the world.

Do NOT keep me abreast of new product announcements. Your incremental steps toward world domination need not flood my in-box.

May God have mercy on your souls.

Go Humans,
Joe

Below I have listed the questions that iRobot refused to answer. (The * indicates that the question was written by my brother Dan, who is a hilarious human writer.) Tell me this would not have been a fun interview.

Why do you think people have formed such personal attachments to their Roombas?

What are some of the ways that people have personalized their Roombas?

Do you have a Roomba? What is its name?

If you had to characterize your Roomba’s personality, would you say it’s “saucy?”

Isn’t iRobot’s Roomba just a low-tech rip-off of Rosie from The Jetsons? Have Hanna-Barbera’s lawyers contacted you yet?

Can the Roomba feel love?

* Do you have any tips for how NOT to fall in love with a Roomba?

Was the first Roomba constructed by a horribly disfigured scientist working alone in his abandoned castle?

How do you think robots 1,000 years from now will react when they discover they were descended from vacuum cleaners?

Do you think it’s possible that robots 1,000 years from now will lie and say they were descended from the military’s unmanned aerial vehicles, just so they don’t get their butts kicked by cyborg punks in high school?

Given that history has a way of repeating itself, do you think it is possible that the first human beings were vacuum cleaners of some type? That maybe we climbed out of the primordial ooze to clean up the shore and simply overstayed our welcome?

* Is there some sort of large, drone-bearing Mother Roomba that we need to be worried about?

* Can you feed your Roomba after midnight?

Have you ever had a Roomba turn against its human master like the first law enforcement robot from Robocop?

Just so we are clear, the settings on the Roomba do NOT include Human Extinction or Global Domination. Is that correct?

Could one order the Global Domination setting optional? Maybe I’m a military strongman and I’m building an army of robots. Would it be possible to launch a division of Roombas to vacuum my opponents while I hid three miles beneath the earth in my secret futuristic-looking lair?

Since no one at iRobot spoke with me, I can only speculate on the robot-human attachment. So here’s my take. Human beings form attachments with everything. I have a friend with a deep emotional attachment to Diet Coke. I have another friend who has an emotional attachment with the worst franchise in sports history, the Cincinnati Bengals. I myself had a deep emotional attachment with a 1991 Buick LeSabre.
(Above: A little part of me died when I sold that car. And that part, was my kidney.)

These are all healthy attachments because all of these things in some way bring joy into our lives. Especially that LeSabre. It was like a couch on wheels. I miss that car the way a fat kid misses shoving people out of the way to get cake.

So that’s my theory. People can love anything. Robots qualify as anything. Therefore people can love robots.

If you sense a little disappointment in my writing voice, iRobot, it is because I have the capacity to smile and laugh and love and hurt and cry. That is something you and your uber-rational sentinels will never comprehend. So go ahead. Enslave the human race. Send us down to work in your robot mines where we will dig for robot gold for your robot king. I will still pity you. Because you will never know what it is to feel joy or pain, you heartless, soulless bastards.

Go Humans.

To read Joe’s previous column “Deloitte & Touche & Women” click here.

Have you “had it” with looking for “the right person” to spend the rest “of” your life with? Are you tired of watching “American Idol” alone while your roommate goes to her boyfriend’s house to watch him play video games? Do you feel the sudden, inexplicable urge to buy a cat, or cats?

Then we’ve got the solution for you.

Welcome to the “First Annual Spring Guide to Finding Love for People Who Don’t Want to Die Alone.” Consider this handy article your first step to a life filled with the permanent enjoyment of temporary fulfillment.

(Cue the sad piano.)

It’s a fact of life. Every day in this country thousands of people die alone.

Let’s face it. Most of them deserve to.

If they were better people, they would have found someone. Clearly there was something massively wrong with them.

So say a team of scientists in silky pink smocks at the University of Romance in Loveland, Colo., who recently determined that most singles suffer from the same flaw that’s keeping our space shuttle grounded _ high standards.

The solution?

(Cue the “Deep Thoughts” music from “Saturday Night Live.”)

Guideline No. 1: Lower your standards

If modern intellectuals have taught us anything _ and they haven’t _ it’s that compromising your values is a surefire path to happiness. Remember how you wanted to be a baseball player as a kid? And now you work for a PR firm that does work with a minor league team? That worked out great. You’re as happy as Derek Jeter, right?

Take our advice. Don’t look for someone smarter than you _ look for someone who’s not stupid. Don’t look for someone ambitious _ look for someone who’s gunning straight for the middle and intends to stay there. Don’t look for your lifelong best friend _ look for someone you don’t mind seeing a movie with.

Marriages are built on such compromises. And even though I haven’t checked the statistics for the last 40 years, I’m pretty darn sure most marriages still turn out all right.

And that leads us to our next rule.

(Cue “Here Comes the Bride.”)

Guideline No. 2: Set an arbitrary age to get married by (and stick to it)

This guideline only SEEMS insane. Ignore the little voice in your head that says, “But what if you haven’t met the right person by then?” That little voice wants you to be single because that little voice eats the part of your brain that tries to think of pickup lines at bars. We hate that little voice.

Tell yourself, “I’m going to be married by the time I’m 30.” If you’re dating someone when you’re 29, that person is your spouse!

Don’t let little things like lack of communication, arguments over money or rampant infidelity get in the way of your goal. Ignore friends who think you’re making a mistake. They’re not proactive like you are. Keep your eyes on the prize.

And there’s only one way to land the kind of psychopath who will gladly go along with such a plan.

(Cue the porno music.)

Guideline No. 3: Sleep with everyone

We can’t stress this enough. Casual sex is a great way to meet new people. Don’t be fooled by people who tell you this is a mistake. Try and sleep with those people. It’s the right thing to do.

(Cue “Amazing Grace.”)

Think about it. Do you really want to die alone? Wouldn’t you much rather leave a grief-stricken spouse behind, someone who’s so overwrought with pain that his or her life without you is a living hell? Come on, the choice is obvious.

(Originally published 4/21/04.)

Click here to read the previous column “Halt the Spread of Time Banditry.”

If you have a comment, e-mail me at joedonatellicolumn@gmail.com.

A few weeks ago I was on the phone with my friend “Nick.” He was at work. I was at home. We were talking about what all men talk about on the phone: nothing.

He told me about his acting class. We made plans to see a comedy show. Then we performed our daily in-depth, “Pentagon Papers”-esque critique of the previous night’s 6 p.m., 7:30 p.m. and 11 p.m. “Simpsons.”

Only men appreciate the subtlety of the dance, because only we can properly sidestep ever saying anything remotely meaningful. Blah-blah Browns defense blah-blah stupid Flanders blah-blah might rain this weekend, then again, might not. First guy to let an actual emotion slip dances alone.

And so it came as a shock when, in mid-sentence, Nick cut me off and said “I love you.”

Click.

I was stunned. Sure we were friends — I was the best man in his wedding — but I never knew he felt this way. He had completely bypassed every intermediate step on his way to the Big One. No “I like you,” or “I enjoy spending time with you,” or “You complete me.”

I love you.

The words hung in the air like a Hello Kitty fanny pack in the Oakland Raiders’ locker room.

Clearly he was joking, I reasoned. He’s giving me the Tenacious D friendship test. He’ll call back any minute, laughing.

So I waited. And waited. And waited.

(For the record, I now know how it feels when a man says he loves you and never calls. It just hurts — so much.)

Finally, I called him back. He wanted to know if I noticed what he said. Like if I said no, maybe we could both deny it ever happened. Sweep it under the rug. The temptation was overpowering.

But there was no way I could let him off the hook. This type of situation comes along maybe once a decade, and it can and will be used against him until we are old men.

He quickly explained that his boss had burst into his office and surprised him. Because he’s new at his job, he didn’t want the boss to think he had been on the phone with a friend for 20 minutes. Even though he had.

So Nick pretended that I was his wife. (For hopefully the first, last and only time.)

Well, I’m happy to say that today our friendship is stronger than ever. We have overcome what was nearly a friendship-destroying profession of love by forthrightly acknowledging the important lessons learned from this incident.

If you’re on the phone with your best friend and he says, “I love you,” it’s probably because his boss just walked in. In these situations, it’s best to hang up the receiver calmly and begin calculating how much beer he now owes you.

Secondly, straight men should say “I love you” only if: (1) You are both running backs for the Chicago Bears and one of you is dying (2) It will keep one of you from getting in trouble at work.

On all other occasions — birthdays, weddings, NFL playoff victories — it is best to use the less-controversial “Dude, you complete me.”

(Originally published 3/17/03.)

Click here to read the previous column “Disco Dopes.”

If you have a comment, e-mail me at joedonatellicolumn@gmail.com.