I got a call from a friend the other day. He was sad because his girlfriend of eight years had dumped him like a wet sandwich. His ex was a former beauty queen, blonde and curvy, and, of course, she had a new boyfriend before her old SO had dried his tears.

“I thought we were tight,” he told me, sniveling a little into his iPhone. “What about the kids we were going to have? The babies!”

“Brother,” I said, “You live with your mom. You don’t have a job and you are a second-tier climber. When it comes to beautiful women, you can either be unemployed and be Chris Sharma, or make a lot of money and be a sub-par climber. What you can’t be is a total loser. I don’t know how you got a girlfriend to begin with anyhow.

"You're like the kid at school with head lice that no one wants to play with," I said, quoting my favorite line from the Pecker in Tropic Thunder. "You've got to shave your head and get back on the monkeybars."

My advice seemed to calm him a little and he asked me if we had any job openings at Rock and Ice.

“We do,” I said, “But I only hung out with you because you had a hot girlfriend. Now get out of my face!”

The phone call made me realize that I have a lot of mature wisdom about women and what they want, and that I should share it, and, perhaps, spare all men under 50 the heartache suffered by my little buddy.

WHAT WOMEN WANT, THE SHORT LIST

1) A car. Make this a working car, with gas and a passenger’s seat. A car is the modern version of the warhorse, a big proud stallion ridden by knights and kings for trampling the serfs. Women look for "resource benefits" and at the most basic level this is a car. They also like for you to drive them around. If they have to drive you around, you will soon be walking.

2) A house. A nice roomy tent will suffice while you are on the road, or better, one of those hard-shell camper things, but ultimately you need an actual place to live. Renting will make do short term, but owning a house puts you at the top of the eligible-man food chain. Securing a domicile could be your greatest challenge as it also requires that you have:

3) A job. Women don’t seem to be picky about what type of work you do as long as it is regular and you don’t ask to go Dutch. Sure, on the first few outings your date will tell you that you should split everything with her. Go along only if you never want to see her again. The proper response, even if you are living on food stamps, is to say "I insist on paying for everything. I have lots of money." Consider that and set your employment sights well above minimum wage.

4) A rope and a rack. And a pack for carrying it in. Get an expedition pack and you can carry all of her stuff, too.

5) Any type of music that you don’t like. Doesn’t matter what it is, if you like it, she won’t. Same with movies and books. Buy a bunch of music that makes you flinch (think show tunes like “Tomorrow” from Little Orphan Annie) and sing along. Bingo!

6) A real man. I felt sorry for my little buddy so I set him up with a hot date, a former Rock and Ice intern, arranging for them to meet coincidentally at an office party. My daughters, ages 10 and 11, were there, eating candy on the sofa in the Vennon Lounge. Little buddy and the hot ex-intern arrived, and he hopped on the couch and showed my daughters a few magical and amazing card tricks. Out of the corner of my eye I could see that the intern was watching him very carefully. Cool, I thought, this is going perfectly. A few days later I followed up with the intern, asking her what she thought of my friend. “He’s fine,” she said, “but he plays with kids. I think we’ll just be friends.”

Don’t play with other people’s kids. Be a man.

7) A man who listens. Women are going to tell you one or two important things that will be stirred in among thousands of completely trivial details. Yet you will be expected to remember all of them and to react thoughtfully to each one. If you can’t understand what she just said, ask a tangential question and try to quickly piece it together. If you can’t remember, do the same.

8) A man who has emotions. The female brain has a larger emotional region than yours. I don’t know what occupies the space where we are supposed to have emotions, but I’ll guess and call it the “sports region,” a geographical lobe the size of Texas that controls everything you do and say. This is, I think, what makes it difficult for men to have long-term relationships and could be why my little buddy is out there today, bouldering in the snow, listening to heavy metal on his iPod, car-less, homeless, unemployed, all alone but available.