Not Valid When Used After . . .

You’re in the bookstore. The self-help aisle. You’re awed by the number of titles at your disposal.

You also can’t help but feel a bit touched. All these authors--people you’ve never even met--want to help you and your relationship. Fabulous. Now all you have to do is make your selection.

Hmmm . . . you’ve been burned before. There was that one book (honestly) that told you to greet your significant other at the door--naked and wrapped in plastic wrap. Yeah, that seemed like a good idea. For about three minutes. Then there was the book that tried to convince you (really) that women have it easier than men because they can wear pants, whereas a guy who wears a skirt in public faces arrest. Uh-huh. Oh, do you feel silly now for falling, however momentarily, for that sort of stuff. What were you thinking? What were the authors thinking?

And now as you stand ready to make another perilous purchasing decision, you wonder: Shouldn’t relationship advice come with an expiration date, like a carton of milk or a bottle of painkillers? You’d know that on July 29, 1998, the book you bought on loving men who love themselves too much just wasn’t going to hold water anymore. Use at your own risk.

So, can we get the FDA in on this job already?

Unfortunately, as with most things, it’s not quite that simple. Relationships--say (who else?) the relationship experts--aren’t about cartons of milk, they’re about people. And people tend to be a little more complex than, say, your average glass of 2% fat.

“The problem is you can’t know. With drugs, after a while, they lose their potency and you can measure that loss of potency, but life changes so quickly,” says noted psychologist Joyce Brothers, who has been advising Americans through parts of five decades now.

“There are all kinds of wild cards in our lives that have no way of being predicted, like nuclear bombs and the rise of the computer and all those things that affect our daily lives,” Brothers says.

And there may be no wilder cards than men and women--and how they are perceived to fit and function in society.

“My grandmother never worked. My granddaddy went out and worked. When my mother was coming up, she and my father both worked. As I came up, that’s the same thing that [my husband and I] do,” says KLSX-FM (97.1) talk-show host Jo Anne Hart, who has dispensed no-nonsense advice under the “Mother Love” handle for some 20 years. “Times change and roles change.”

In other words, it’s anyone’s guess as to where the man / woman game is headed. The thing about humans, though, is that we do try to guess. And we like to put our guesses between book covers and try to get others to buy them.

That would explain how library shelves get lined with musty titles like “Ideal Marriage,” a 1926 offering by Theodoor Hendrik van de Velde, which notes that “the beginning of married life is a school . . . and the teacher is [the] husband.”

Or Margery Wilson’s “How to Make the Most of Wife” (1947), which advises a man to occasionally surprise his spouse by asking the little woman for her opinion. “If she is shy or dull,” Wilson wrote, “she will feel a new thrill of importance.” (Oh, go ahead--let her live a little.)

And then there’s Ira Lunan Ferguson’s 1976 effort, “25 Good Reasons Why Men Should Marry.” Whether the reasons are indeed “good” is debatable. Among them: “A Wife Is a Built-in Chauffeur,” “A Wife Is a Built-in Chef / Cook” and the all-important, “A Wife Is a Built-in Valet.”

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However well intended at the time they were published, you won’t find a lot of people trumpeting these notions today.

If any relationship advice cries for an expiration date stamp, it might just be Ferguson claiming that a wife is a husband’s “bosom friend” because “she actually has a bosom, where he can lay his head and relax.”

Best-selling author Brothers, with titles such as “What Every Woman Ought to Know About Love & Marriage” and “The Brothers System for Liberated Love and Marriage,” is mindful of the pitfalls of pontificating in print. She, in fact, stamped one of her early books (1961’s “Woman”) with a sort of “sell by” date. Brothers had it written into her book contract that “Woman” lapse into out-of-print status 10 years after publication. And it did.

“ ‘Woman’ would be an enormous embarrassment to me today,” Brothers says. “I was seeing so many changes happening in women’s lives . . . that I was very uncomfortable about predicting the future.”

Among the statements that make Brothers cringe today: “I felt it was very important for women not to take jobs when children were little.” Her advice at the time was if you want to have a career, only have one child; if you want to have “a bunch of kids,” forget the career.

Brothers, who stopped teaching for several years to raise daughter Lisa, says she just doesn’t believe that anymore. It was Brothers’ now-grown and married child who helped change her perception. “My daughter is an ophthalmologist surgeon, has four children and she’s doing just fine,” she says.

(For the record, Brothers thinks the rest of her books remain valid. And don’t think she doesn’t check. She leafs through “What Every Woman Should Know About Men” every once in a while, she says, just to make sure everything’s OK.)

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So, why--or how--does some advice keep and some advice rot?

For Jerome Front, a Studio City-based licensed marriage, family and child counselor, it’s all about backing up your theories with hard facts--including clinical research and literature.

“The advice most likely to expire will be the advice that the author gives based on their own experience, because it won’t necessarily apply to a broader audience,” he says.

What seem to apply to the broadest audience are what might be known as “the perennials”--those pieces of relationship advice that work regardless or time or era and don’t even necessarily need a mountain of research to prove their validity.

“What worked for my mother’s generation, some things will work for me now because they are timeless,” says Mother Love, who joined the ranks of authors / gurus with the publication last year of “Listen Up, Girlfriends! Lessons on Life from the Queen of Advice” (St. Martin’s Press). For Mother Love’s money, one of the best bits of advice she ever received came via her mother from Shakespeare: “To thine own self be true.” “Be able to look yourself in the mirror every day and like what you see,” she says. “If you don’t like what you see looking back at you, then you work on it.”

To Brothers, “Don’t marry with your head, marry with your heart” is an adage that never wears an inappropriate hemline.

Front stresses open communication. “Any time you have current-day literature that in any way refers to improving communication, learning to be more empathetic, learning to improve listening . . . all of these are extremely useful ideas,” he says.

And if case history is any indication, Dan Cirlin, a retired graphic arts salesman from Van Nuys, just might have the biggest pearl of all: Be positive.

On Jan. 2, 1947, Cirlin was in Berkeley on a double (blind) date. He liked his date. A lot. (“That’s the kind of girl I could marry,” Cirlin told his buddy.) Two dates later he proposed, and in August of that same year, the couple wed. Almost 49 years later, they’re still together. “That’s positive thinking!” Cirlin says.

Now, there’s something you probably wouldn’t want to toss from the medicine cabinet after just a few months. In fact, if anything, you just might want to order a refill.