Forget about Women! Adopting a Cat Is a Far More Rewarding Alternative for Some Guys Who Are Searching for Their Forever Valentines

 Cats Make the Perfect Valentines

"Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your heart or burn down your house, you can never tell."
-- Joan Crawford

Valentine's Day has come and gone and, lamentably, many guys once again found themselves without anyone to buy chocolates and roses for or even for that matter to take out to a swanky restaurant for a sit-down meal. Instead, they were relegated to spending the entire day home alone staring at the four walls and pacing the floor.

Scarfing down warmed-up TV dinners and chug-a-lugging six-packs of Pabst Blue Ribbon® did not help much either to take the sting out of their empty and lonely existences. At the close of their seemingly interminable days their only consolation was watching reruns of Bonanza, The Saint, and The Beverly Hillbillies on YouTube.

Every bit as deplorable, their unhappiness was in vain in that it could have been so easily remedied if only they had known not to look to the tender gender for their deliverance but rather to their local animal shelter. There they surely would have found hundreds of adorable cats ready, willing, and able to have ventured into their unfinished lives and to gladly have made them complete.

"There is something about the presence of a cat...that seems to take the bite out of being alone," veterinarian Albert J. Camuti once observed.

For those who still require convincing, there are countless reasons why adopting a cat is a better option than waiting around for Miss Right to leisurely stroll into one's world and that which follows is an examination of just a few of them.

1.) Easier to Get in Bed.

Not wasting any time and immediately getting right down to the nitty-gritty, there can be little disputing that getting a cat in the sack is a far easier task to pull off than doing likewise with a woman. The payoff may not be in any way comparable but the getting is most assuredly a piece of cake.

In stark contrast to the situation with women, the problem with cats is not so much getting them in bed but rather getting them out of it. In particular, digging out each morning from underneath a blanket of five to ten slumbering felines can be quite a job and that is especially the case in that they do not recognize any such thing as a final eviction notice.

Rather, they seem to believe that all beds belong to them. "In my experience, cats and beds seem to be a natural combination," Camuti added.

Author Stephen L. Baker even has gone to the trouble of calculating just how many cats that an average size bed can accommodate. "Most beds sleep up to six cats," he has deduced. "Ten without the owner."

In that respect it is a good thing that geometry is not the species' strong suit otherwise an owner soon might very well find himself shivering all alone on the cold, hardwood flooring. Having a bed full of cats also furnishes a bloke with an apt rejoinder to all of those loudmouths in the pubs who are all the time bragging about their numerous conquests.

Getting a Cat Out of Bed Is Not an Easy Task

In particular a man could, if he should be so inclined, truthfully chime in by declaring that he, too, has a bed full of pussy every night. There is not any need for him to let on that his bedfellows are of the four-legged variety.

2.) Nothing to Fear from the Me Too Movement.

A man can smooch and goose a cat to his heart's content without fear of provoking a blizzard of reprisals and condemnations from the Me Too Movement. Even the sneaking of a fast feel might not be totally out of the question.

A man likewise need not worry about getting into the pickle that befell former president George Herbert Walker Bush. On the other hand, no sensible man ever would even so much as contemplate polluting the noble and pristine souls of cats with off-color jokes and dirty ditties.

3.) Health Benefits.

Substituting a cat for a woman as a bed partner furnishes a man with an opportunity to get a good night's rest as opposed to waking up knackered each morning as the result of having had to slug it out between the sheets with some insatiable woman all night long. There are, of course, some veterinarians who slanderously claim that cats are too dirty to sleep with but they quite obviously never have shared a pillow with some women. (See NBC-TV, January 25, 2011, "Out of the Sack, Cat! Sleeping with Pets Carries Disease Risk.")

Cats additionally teach men how to relax thereby reducing stress levels which in turn promotes cardiovascular health. (See U.S. News and World Report, February 21, 2008, "Cats Help Shield Owners from Heart Attack. Study Finds Thirty Per Cent Risk Reduction When Felines Are in the Home.")

4.) Excellent Listeners.

When it comes to having someone who is willing to listen to a man's troubles, cats simply cannot be beaten. They never interrupt, rudely commence gassing on their mobile telephones, or cleverly steer the conversation around to their own worries. (See moggies.co.uk, October 11, 2007, "Forget Therapists -- Pets Are the Listeners.")

5.) Good Providers.

When it comes to putting food on the table a woman is almost totally useless. For example, some of them are incapable of even possessing the savoir-faire to use a can opener. Others do not have so much as a clue as how to make cold water hot.

Even when they are supplied with enough Lebensmittel in order to feed an army, what they often end up preparing is inedible. At other times, it very well could be laced with poison so as to get an older man out of the way and thus to allow her to not only get her hands on his money but to run off with a young gallant.

A cat at least can be depended upon to occasionally bring home a dead mouse or two. Not wanting to seem ungrateful, some men douse the rodents with ketchup and try not to think about what they are eating.

For vegetarians, however, such an expedient is not an option. Instead, they are forced into acting out ridiculous pantomimes for the benefit of their cats whereby they pretend to devour their unfortunate victims before discreetly burying them in the garden.

Most Beds Will Comfortably Sleep Six Cats but Only Two Big Fat Women

On this issue it is admittedly a close call but at the end of the day the vote has to go to cats. Sometimes it is the thought that counts.

6.) Security.

Owing to their truly remarkable sense of hearing, cats make excellent sentries. For instance, they are capable of detecting the presence of intruders on foot from as far away as one-hundred yards. They also are capable of hearing nails lose from their moorings long before the pictures and photographs that they support coming crashing to the floor.

Even more impressive, countless individuals are alive today all because their cats detected gas leaks, fires, and the presence of burglars. (See Cat Defender posts of April 23, 2007 and October 31, 2007 entitled, respectively, "Winnie Saves an Indians Family of Three from Dying of Carbon Monoxide Poisoning" and "Bacon Shows His Appreciation and Love for His Rescuer by Awakening Her from a Burning Apartment.")

7.) Cleanliness.

When it comes to personal hygiene, it is no contest and cats win hands-down. "A cat is the only domestic animal I know who toilet trains itself and does a damned impressive job of it," author Joseph Epstein once marveled.

On the other hand, some women fanatically believe that soap and water are corrosives that will wear out their skins and they accordingly avoid them as if they were the plague. With such an attitude, it is not surprising that they are the repositories of contagious diseases, toxic chemicals, obnoxious smells, and all sorts of accumulated grime and dirt.

Before even permitting one of them indoors it often is necessary to strip them down in the backyard, douse them with a bucket of soap, and then turn a garden hose on them. Following that there is the painstaking and time-consuming job of scraping off all sorts of paint, glue, caked-on mascara, abhorrent smelling perfumes, and who knows what other contaminants.

In severe cases, it sometimes is even necessary to rake them across a scrubboard a time or two in order to get at stubborn grime and grease. Next, it is off to the barn in order to borrow Old Paint's comb for the purpose of giving them a good currying from head to toe. Untangling their long, unkempt, and unwashed manes is not any walk in the park either given that some of them have a tendency to scratch like a cat and to kick like a mule.

Provided that a fellow has not keeled over from exhaustion by that time, he next must transport them to the health clinic in order to have them vaccinated; the vets will not touch them with twenty-foot poles. After that it is back home and a trip to the smokehouse where, in some cases, it is necessary to hang them on  hooks for thirty days in order to allow them to cure properly and for any lingering bad smells to dissipate.

These precautions are necessary in order to, first of all, prevent the spread of diseases and germs. Those fellows who are tempted to try and get around this prickly problem by following in the footsteps of judge Roy Moore by robbing the cradle need to bear in mind that some girls of today, if press reports are to be believed, are old, worn-out, and diseased by the time that they reach the ripe old age of fourteen.

Secondly, a man likes to know what is underneath all of that paint and glue. In particular, it is imperative that he make sure in advance that he is getting one-hundred per cent woman without any undesirable subtractions and additions as is the case with those hybrids that are now on the market. Half & Half® may be all right in the java but not in a woman.

A Cat Is the Epitome of Cleanliness

In that respect, the Me Too Movement has been sorely remiss for failing to include a proviso in its manifesto whereby concerned members of the opposite sex could satisfy their legitimate concerns in this area. Such an initiative would need to be carefully crafted, however, so as to prevent all sorts of rotters from exploiting such a loophole in order to stock up on a year's supply of finger pie in one swoop.

Finally, after a man has invested all that time, trouble, and expense cleaning, scrubbing, delousing, currying, manicuring, pedicuring, and inoculating a woman he surely would be entitled to enjoy the fruits of his labors. Unfortunately, that hardly ever turns out to be the case because as soon as he takes his eyes off of her for so long as a solitary minute she is sure to abscond with the pizza delivery boy.

Such a disastrous dénouement hardly seems fair but, on second thought, perhaps turning that garden hose on her was carrying cleanliness a bit too far. Still, when it comes to a women a man likes a clean body; a dirty mind is all right. The latter never has been known to send a bloke trotting off to the health clinic.

That is just one example of how the best laid plans of any man can go awry whenever they happen to include a woman. For instance, in this case the man not only lost the woman but, even worse, the cats no longer have anyone to deliver their piping-hot pies! Women may be a dime a dozen but a good delivery boy is not quite so easily replaced.

Cleaning up and straightening out a woman accordingly requires a huge investment of time, energy, and money from which a man can only expect minimal, if any, dividends. It is far too arduous a job for most old goats to undertake and young bucks, who already have their pick of the litter, do not have any interest in taking on any reclamation projects. As a result, the majority of these women wind up at either the Old Spinsters' Society, the Lesbian League, or in even direr straits.

With a cat it is an entirely different matter in that even a down-at-the-heel denizen of the street can be taken in and successfully rehabilitated almost overnight and with very little cost and effort. Cats consequently are what the gurus on Wall Street would call low investment, high-yield stocks.

8.) No Need to Keep Up with the Joneses.

Keeping a cat is considerably easier on the wallet than having a woman. About all that it takes in order to satisfy the former are tuna, kibble, milk, and water whereas even expensive jewelry, exotic vacations, and a lavish lifestyle often are insufficient to keep the latter at home.

Consequently, with a cat a man does not have to worry about keeping pace with the Joneses. First of all, it is unlikely that any cat ever has so much as heard of them. Secondly, even if the reverse should turn out to be true, no cat gives so much as a non Gradus Anus Rodentum about keeping up with them.

Moreover, just the simple act of getting rid of a woman and replacing her with a cat has been known to transform beleaguered, cash-strapped working stiffs into relaxed spectators of this world with their pockets bulging with greenbacks. Perhaps most importantly of all, cats do not consider it to be either a federal offense or a sure sign of moral decay for a man to be a lazy bum who lies around the house all day doing absolutely nothing.

9.) Wardrobe Expenses Are Negligible.

Absolutely no one has ever heard any self-respecting cat to complain about not having anything to wear. Au contraire, they gladly wear the same old seven and six year in and year out.

Watch Out for Those Pizza Toters; They Deliver More Than Pies for the Cats

On the other hand, some women would not be satisfied with a man who owned a clothing factory. Compounding matters further, some men have been forced into adding entire wings to their houses just to have a place in order to store all the clothing and accessories that their wives never wear.

10.) Real Homebodies.

As is the case with clothing, no one ever has heard a cat complain that its owner never takes it anywhere. Being true homebodies, they never want to go anywhere and that nips that dilemma right in the bud.

By contrast, women have an annoying habit of dragging their male counterparts not only all over town but, sometimes, halfway around the world. Aside from the incredible expense involved in such excursions, all of that moving around is bound to sooner or later wear out a bloke.

11.)  Free Heat.

At this juncture some men may be prompted to object that they could not possibly make it through these long, cold winter nights without having one or two big fat women in order to prevent them from freezing to death. That certainly is a point well taken in that the invaluable contributions made by the beefy babes and chunky chicks of this world can in no way be underestimated.

If events had turned out differently and all that had been around at the dawning of time were those skinny young wigglers, jigglers, and gigglers of today, the human race surely never would have made it out of the starting gate. It therefore is not surprising that it is precisely at those times when the bottom has dropped out of the thermometer, there is a foot of snow on the ground, and the furnace has conked out that the Bertha Butts and Two-Ton Thelmas of this world shine the brightest.

Nestled up warm and snug between them, a man could not possibly feel any pain. The situation is entirely different with those short-sighted fellows who foolishly attempt to make it through these hellish winters with only bags of bones for comfort.

Having readily acknowledged all of that, it nevertheless must be pointed out that a man can fare every bit as well by curling up each night with four to five well-fed cats. Doing so also spares him the expense, labor in the kitchen, and subsequent clean-up that goes hand-in-hand with the preparation of a large pots of soup beans, seasoned to the nine with ramps and jalapeno peppers, a mess or two of turnip greens, half an acre of home fries, three or four cakes of corn dodger and, to wash it all down, a couple of liters of Ripple.®

Whereas a cat's rhythmic purring can be every bit as reassuring as it is soporific, Bertha's and Thelma's loud snoring, burping, belching, and backfiring all night can be a bit disconcerting. Plus, there is always the possibility that either one or both of them will pass out on top of a fellow one night and suffocate him to death.

With cats, however, a man seldom has to put up with any unpleasant smells, sounds, or other intrusions into his repose. "Cats are rather delicate creatures and they are subject to a good many ailments, but I have never heard of one who suffered from insomnia," writer Joseph Wood Krutsch once declared.

Then there is the added expense if the girls ever should want to go anywhere, such as to (who knows why?) the beauty parlor, to be factored into the equation. In that regard, the most efficient way to accommodate women of that size would be to rent a hoist in order to take them out through the roof so that they then could be loaded onto the back of a truck for a trip to the freight depot. There they in turn could be fastened onto a flat car and moved around as avoirdupois; it is cheaper that way as opposed to purchasing each of them three or four seats on a passenger train.

A Man Should Not Always Behave Like a Tomcat, Especially Toward Women

By switching to cats, however, a man can could avoid all of that bother and expense while at the same time still make it through these long and cold winter nights in relative comfort.

12.) No Obnoxious Relatives and Disagreeable Entanglements.

The best thing about cats is, arguably, that they are real loners. For an owner, that translates into him being free to forget about putting up with any obnoxious relatives and friends, which just about all women attract in droves.

Cats also do not have any use whatsoever for religion, politics, and flag-waving and that is truly a beautiful character trait. Furthermore, they never will pollute a man's life by having the faintest bit of interest whatsoever in boring, sleazy, and corrupt athletics.

13.) No Bad Habits.

Cats do not drink, smoke, use drugs, or gamble and the same most assuredly cannot be said for the vast majority of women. They also seldom either snore or refuse to bathe.

14.) A Lack of Malice.

One of the most endearing character traits enjoyed by members of the species is their total lack of malice. For example, whenever little squabbles ensue, such as over who is entitled to the last wedge of cheesecake or whose turn it is to sit in the rocking chair, they are soon patched up and forgotten with a loving pat on the head and the offer of a small treat.

"As anyone who has ever been around a cat for any length of time well knows cats have enormous patience with the limitations of the human kind," Cleveland Amory, author of the 1987 bestseller The Cat Who Came for Christmas, once noted.

It is an entirely different matter with a woman. Every affront, whether real or imagined, is immediately seized upon as an annuity to be nurtured and safeguarded until a propitious time arrives when it can be dredged up, thrown in a man's face, and milked for all that it is worth.

15.) A Total Lack of Jealousy.

Since cats are not the jealous types a man can have as many of them as he so desires. At the same time it goes almost without saying that few women would be amendable to such a laissez-faire arrangement.

16.) Honesty.

"A cat has absolute honesty," Ernest Hemingway once pointed out. "Humans beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not."

Differences between the sexes only serve to compound that problem. "Woman's heart and mind are insoluble puzzles to the male," Sherlock Holmes observed in Arthur Conan Doyle's short-story, "The Adventure of the Illustrious Client."

What Man Could Ask for More?

17.)  Non-Judgmental.

So long as a man treats it well, a cat could care less about what the remainder of society thinks about him. Furthermore, it does not care one whit about the size of his house, the make and model of his old jalopy, or his social standing. He likewise could be a peripatetic hobo who is looked down upon by all of society and that would not matter to his cat.

18.) Heuristic Considerations.

"The intelligent, peace-loving, four-footed friends -- who are without prejudice, without hate, without greed -- may someday teach us something," celebrated novelist Lilian Jackson Brown once predicted.

Comedian and actor Bill Dana already has been the beneficiary of their tutelage. "I had been told that the training procedure with cats was difficult," he has acknowledged. "It's not. Mine had me trained in two days."

Gary Smith is another convert. "Everything I know I learned from my cat," he once candidly admitted. "When you're hungry, eat. When you're tired, nap in a sunbeam. When you go to the vet's, pee on your owner."

One of their chief contributions in this area is that since they live such terribly brief existences they instill in their caretakers an almost reverential respect for the present. C'est-à-dire, individuals should live for today, cherish the moment, and not leave important matters unfinished because tomorrow is not guaranteed to any man or cat.

"There is indeed no single quality of the cat that man could not emulate to his advantage," Carl Van Vechten proclaimed in his 1922 magnum opus, The Tiger in the House.

Whereas that is generally true, a man nevertheless should perhaps think twice about asking his resident tom to supply him with a few pointers on the ancient art of lovemaking. The problem is not that he would be unwilling to do so but rather that it would not be a good idea for any man to attempt to put into practice such advice.

For example, chasing a woman around the house in a prelude to pinning her to the floor with his teeth clinched around her neck and then porking her from behind is not a good idea. First of all, women do not appreciate such rough handling.

Secondly, jurists also take a dim view of such behavior to the tune of about thirty years in the state penitentiary. Thirdly, if the Me Too Movement ever got wind of such goings on it would be howling from now until Judgment Day.

Also, hanging out until the small hours underneath the window of the source of one's affliction all the while crying piteously like a lovesick tomcat is not recommended. Although the damsel in question might be flattered by such devotion, the neighbors are unlikely to feel quite as charitable.

What goes for them goes doubly for the local gendarmes. After all, they eagerly await their turns on the graveyard shift so that they can get in a full week's worth of kip on the public's dime and for that reason they are unlikely to take kindly to having their repose interrupted, especially by some fool of a man who thinks that he has been reincarnated as an overgrown tomcat.

Millions of Cats Are Waiting to Be Someone's Valentine

19.) Loyalty.

In a rapidly changing world, the fidelity of a cat is one of the few things in life that a man can count on through thick and thin. Unlike many women, a cat will not run off with the first man with money that comes strutting down the pike.

They care absolutely nothing about money and they never change. A man therefore does not have anything to fear on that score; it could be an entirely different matter, however, with a heaping helping of red salmon and bowl of thick cream.

Cats even remain loyal after death. (See Cat Defender posts of March 28, 2013 and July 27, 2013 entitled, respectively, "Even the Finality of the Grave Fails to Diminish Toldo's Abiding Love and Devotion for His Long Dead Guardian" and "Instead of Killing Her Off with a Jab of Sodium Pentobarbital and Then Burning Her Corpse, Ian Remains Steadfast at His Guardian's Side Long after Her Death.")

Women, however, are more often than not relieved once a bloke is gone. As a result, a complete stranger is soon thereafter sleeping in the deceased's bed, guzzling his port, and gambling away his hard-earned cash.

Only his cat remains loyal and after a while even it realizes that he is not coming back and gives up the vigil. C'est la vie!

20.)  No Regrets.

The best reason of all as to why a cat makes a far better valentine than a woman is that a man can love it with his whole heart, unreservedly, and never with any regrets. No amount of time and money ever spent on it is therefore wasted.

As Thomas Hardy reminded the world in his 1876 novel, The Hand of Ethelberta, "a lover without indiscretion is no lover at all."

It was perhaps Charles Dickens, however, who best summed up the situation with his declaration: "What greater gift than the love of a cat?"

Loving a cat does come with one huge negative and that is their shortened life expectancies. Moreover, once it is gone there simply is not any conceivable way of closing the rent that its passing leaves in a man's heart.

Conclusion:

As it hopefully has been convincingly demonstrated, cats are clearly the better choice but that bit of gratuitous advice is bound to fall upon the deaf ears of those young bucks who simply must have the services of a woman every night. Ergo, the tender gender has little to fear from feline competition in that they are destined to remain what most men continue to covet the most and to pursue the most fervently.

A Cat's Love Is Eternal Like This 1909 Valentine

Furthermore, romantic love never has suffered from any lack of defenders. "The happiness of one man and one woman is the greatest thing in all the world," Hercule Poirot declared in Dame Agatha's 1920 novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles.

Rather, this essay is directed at those chaps who have gotten above a certain age and, whether it be attributable to either medical or fiscal constraints, are no longer able to handle those all-night, every night scrimmages between the sheets that all lusty lasses so enjoy. In that light, a cat also is the perfect companion for those who suffer from ED.

"Someone asked Sophocles, 'How do you feel about sex? Are you still able to have a woman?'" Plato related in Book I, 329B of The Republic. "He replied, 'Hush, man; most gladly indeed am I rid of it all, as though I had escaped from a mad and savage master'."

For those unpersuaded blokes who still insist upon throwing caution to the wind and acquiring a wild and woolly woman, they need to fully realize that is a very reckless, not to say foolhardy, thing to attempt. "Love is a fire," actress Joan Crawford once declared. "But whether it is going to warm your heart or burn down your house, you can never tell."

On top of that there is the nearly insurmountable obstacle of finding the right one. Also, there is little solace to be found in the old adage that there are more than one fish in the sea.

“There's lots of good fish in the sea...maybe...but the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring, and if you're not mackerel or herring yourself, you are likely to find very few good fish in the sea,” D. H. Lawrence astutely pointed out in his 1928 novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover. From that it thus would appear that a man's long-term happiness needs to be built upon surer ground than that afforded by a woman's fleeting passion.

All is not lost, however, in that research has shown that having a cat helps couples to stay together. "Research on cohabiting couples show (sic) conclusively that getting a cat is a better indicator of staying together than having a baby," Harry Benson of the Marriage Foundation of Cambridge told The Telegraph on February 15, 2013. (See "Couples Who Get a Kitten Before a Baby 'More Likely to Last'.")

Furthermore, it also is believed that having a cat is a good proving ground for men wanting to advance to getting a woman. For instance, caring for one accustoms him to, inter alia, taking orders, always speaking softly, and to being polite.

He additionally is able to learn from his feline companion a healthy toleration for a certain amount of unpredictable behavior, ill-timed interruptions, and stubbornness. Perhaps most importantly of all, he learns that in order to get the best out of a woman he must, as he does with his cat, spoil her rotten.

Even if all of his best laid plans and schemes should come to naught, his dutiful labors on behalf of the great god Eros need not necessarily to have been completely in vain. "Happiness is a good woman...or a bad woman," is how that comedian George Burns once summed up that eternal dilemma.

Photos: The Philly Voice (gray cat), YouTube (two cats in bed, a cat grooming itself, and one sitting on a fence), The Creative Cat (six cats in bed),  BuzzFeed (a cat eating pizza), Amazon (two cats inside a heart), Pinterest (a gray cat with a heart), and Chorboard of Wikipedia (1909 Valentine).

Disclaimer. No women were harmed during the researching and scratching out of this report although a few of them were discreetly observed, albeit at a safe distance to be sure. That exercise was undertaken not so much as an aid in the furtherance of knowledge but rather just to see what they were up to (nothing worthwhile) and for reasons of personal amusement.