You're lying awake in the middle of the night. You've just had sex with the guy you've been seeing for six months, the guy you call your boyfriend, mostly out of habit rather than pride. You're not thinking, the connection I feel with this man is extraordinary; I want to have a million of his babies and knit him a fisherman's sweater. YOu are thinking, holy crap. If I had known he was a thumb-sucking loser with a mommy complex, I'd be at home eating ice cream watching Project Runway.

What if you COULD have known? On that first date, what if you could just run a laser reader over a guy's forehead and find out Everything? No rifling through his medicine cabinet, no canvassing his friends. Right to the nitty gritty Every tic, every one-night stand, ebvery good quality and bad habit, every time he lied to a girlfriend, stole money from his mom's purse or said "It's not you, it's me" Knowiung all that would save you a lot of sleepless knnights, not to mention a lot of sucky sex. But would that really be a good thing?

Remember Barrym the butthead who cheated on your cousin repeatedly, totalled her car while drunk on Zima and bounced checks for his half of the rent? At some point he fell rapturously in love, pulled a 180 and totally cleaned up his act- right now he is making some woman in New Jersey extremely happy. She knows nothing about his previously slutty ways, his reckless driving or his poor taste in alcoholic beverages. To her, Barry is perfect. But what if she'd found out from one little scan that he once left your cousin outside a movie in the rain for hours while he lost his life savings at poker? She might never have fallen for him. And Barry might never have had a chance to change his life for good.

The thing is, everyone has iffy stuff in his or her background and everybody's flawed (yes, even us). It's a matter of finding the guy whose flaws don't overshadow his good points, the piece of fruit whose bruise you can ignore.

There are wolves out there who will never be sheep. But every guy, in that first moment, that first date, that first kiss, has the potential to be our personal white knight. And just think, if you could swipe his bar code, he could swipe yours. And find out about the time you slept with your boyfriend's best friend while he was away in Europe. And really, no one needs to know that.