After years on the dating scene, you're bound to have your fair share of “war stories.” Journalist Lori Gottlieb and “The Daily Show” writer Kevin Bleyer, authors of “I Love You, Nice to Meet You: A Guy and a Girl Give the Lowdown on Coupling Up,” offer both the male and female perspectives on dating rituals. Here's an excerpt:

Part One

The Ball Is in Your Courting

That Whole “One True Love” Thing

Is your soul mate your sole mate?

He Said ...

My soul mate broke my f-ing heart.

I met her, my supposed “one true love” — a few years ago. She was beautiful, and funny, and I just knew it: we were meant to be. Her name was Katrina. Actually, her name wasn’t Katrina, but I’ll call her that, because by the time our relationship was over, she had devastated me with such hurricane-force brutality my heart involuntarily evacuated my body. I was romantically MIA for years. Two years, to be exact.

Frankly, sometimes I’m still nowhere to be found.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. At the beginning, when the first winds of romance were just starting to blow, I was in love with her, and my soul was in love with her soul, and her soul and my soul and she and I double-dated while sailing off the coast of San Diego.

We were, I thought, perfect for each other, and quickly we went from being too nervous to hold each other’s hand to being willing to pop the most disgusting pimple on each other’s forehead. Our love went from clammy to grotesque, as true love so often does.

One beautiful Saturday morning, after setting our course offshore, we hung a hammock from the mast, and as we lay nestled within it, gently buffeted by the rolling Pacific, I had never felt closer to a woman in my life. Our bodies just ... fit. The way the bodies of soul mates should. Sure, it may have had more to do with the fact that her long legs made up the difference in our heights (once I even wore her leather pants for a Halloween party), but at the time I preferred to chalk it up to something greater than anatomy. Katrina and I simply ... clicked. Within months, we had already discussed marriage and children and who to invite to the wedding and where to live in retirement.

Then, feeling flirty one morning, I snuck into her shower naked and began soaping her back. But instead of luxuriating in my touch, she screamed and punched my head into the shower caddy.

Uh-oh, I thought. My soul mate wouldn’t do that. My soul mate wouldn’t respond to my caress with a roundhouse to my temple. Would she?

NBC VIDEO Deciphering modern dating rituals June 7: Authors Lori Gottlieb and Kevin Bleyer, both single thirty-something's, talk with the "Today" show's Natalie Morales about surviving and finding love, as found in their new book, "I Love You, Nice to Meet You." Today show

Oh, she apologized for hurting me. And I apologized for surprising her. So after the stitches came out, I didn’t lose the faith. I still clung to the belief that Katrina was my soul mate. After all, there was the hammock, the leather pants, the apology.

Then my soul mate embarrassed me in front of my boss. I had brought my soul mate to an office Christmas party and my soul mate told the guy who signs my paychecks that she didn’t think he, as the host of a television show, treated his female guests with respect. Uh-oh, I thought again. Soul mates don’t get you fired, do they? I hadn’t had a soul mate before, so I wasn’t entirely sure, but I suspected that my soul mate wouldn’t make me feel like an idiot and endanger my livelihood.

Plus, my soul mate started making demands of me. “Call me at least once a day.” “Stop by the cleaners on your way over.” “Wipe your feet.” Soul mates aren’t pushy, are they?

Then my soul mate broke up with me. Soul mates don’t break up with you, do they?

Three weeks later, after we got back together (we were soul mates, after all), my soul mate asked me if it would be all right if she stayed registered with the dating service she had joined during our time apart. She had spent a lot of money on it, she pointed out, and it would be “a waste” to just stop showing up. “Plus,” my soul mate added, “it’s kind of interesting, you know, sociologically speaking.” My soul mate wouldn’t go out with other people, would she?

I said no. Screw sociology.

As the days wore on, sometimes my soul mate seemed like my soul mate, other times she seemed to not even like me that much. I feared that the part of my soul mate who was my soul mate was just one of her many personalities, a few of which flew over the cuckoo’s nest. Oh, I wanted it to work, but before I could convene a meeting of her personalities and find a way we could all get along, they apparently assembled without me, took a vote, and the majority ruled that the best plan of action was to break up with me. Again.

“You aren’t the man I need you to be,” they said in unison.

A year later, after my soul mate had become engaged and gotten married to someone else, moved to Dublin, gotten pregnant, and delivered twins, I started to lose hope. That’s not what soul mates do, I thought. They don’t run off, meet a new guy, and start a family within a year of breaking your heart, do they?

“You really dodged a bullet with that one,” my friends told me a couple weeks later. I considered whether they had a point. Soul mates aren’t bullets to be dodged are they? At the very least, if Katrina was my one true soul mate, then my soul was a masochist.

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