A Mate Without Significant Bother

Hey, guys! Did you spend another Valentine’s Day alone? Bummed out? Is there an empty place in your wallet where the photo of a beautiful woman should be? Do you wish you had a special someone to chat about with the other guys at the water cooler?

Relax, gentlemen. Your wait for the perfect girlfriend is almost over. Coming soon to a store near you is the woman of your dreams.

And for $10, you can take her home.

Well, not her exactly, but her image, her love letters and, yes, maybe even her measurements. All the trappings of a wonderful romance can now be yours without the stress or expense of an actual girlfriend.

From the creator of last year’s hit Boyfriend-in-a-Box gift comes Girlfriend-in-a-Box.

“We’ve issued a national casting call for models for the perfect fantasy girlfriend,” says inventor Cathy Hamilton of Ms. Communications in Lawrence, Kan. “Evidently, there are a lot of women who know single men in need of quality companionship--even if it is pure fantasy. We want to help make those men’s dreams come true, if only in their imaginations.”

Like Boyfriend-in-a-Box, Girlfriend will come with desk frame-size and wallet-size photos of the imaginary girlfriend, a prompt card with her vital statistics, a romantic greeting card with her signature, a guarantee she won’t break up with you no matter what you do and a collection of “While You Were Out” memo slips with endearing messages such as “Last night was great! Can’t wait for an encore!”

The boyfriend collection premiered a year ago with six hunks--from Doctor Dave, the Virgo Yalie with a $120,000 annual income and a great bedside manner, to Firefighter Frank, the hot Chicago cutie who rescues damsels in distress.

Although Dave and Frank were the best-selling boyfriends, less-than-studly Miles the Musician and heehaw Cowboy Clint also have their followings. In the first year, close to 100,000 boxed sets of the boyfriend series were sold in gift shops or on the company’s Web site https://www.boyfriendinabox.com.

By August, two more men had joined the virtual boyfriend lineup--dreamy Self-Made Stan and handsome Millionaire Max. Both are over-40 models from Kansas and were added at the request of the many women who wrote in asking for “more mature” imaginary boyfriends.

With a new teen edition of Boyfriend-in-a-Box already in the works, Hamilton says the challenge now is to find the right mix of brains and beauty for the girlfriends line.

“We’ve already had some suggestions. Someone sent in a picture of breasts--very large breasts, thinking that’s what makes the perfect woman. Can you imagine?” sniffs Hamilton. “And then there was the suggestion of ‘Bimbo Betty’ as a catchy name for one of the imaginary girlfriends. Needless to say, that is not what we’re looking for.

“It has become very clear that there are different values at work here. The male psyche and the exact nature of the male fantasy is not as easy to figure out as the woman’s was,” says Hamilton.

So far the submissions for Girlfriend-in-a-Box look pretty much like all those other virtual girlfriends--the ones inside the centerfolds.