DATE: Sunday, April 27, 1997                TAG: 9704170577

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J3   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN

                                            LENGTH:   74 lines

ADVICE ON AVOIDING BAD LOVE ADVICE

The only thing more fervid than the modern American's need for romantic love is the drive of sundry vendors to supply it, more or less instantly, and for a considerable fee.

The so-called experts offer emotional completion via an assortment of trendy therapies and devices ranging from sure-cure seminars for the amatorially dysfunctional to condoms that glow in the dark.

So much solace for the interpersonally butterfingered.

If only any of it worked.

``I have had pretty bad luck in love,'' Merrill Markoe admits right off the bat in Merrill Markoe's Guide to Love (Atlantic Monthly Press, 177 pp., $21).

Which is a credential of a kind. As is Markoe's status as a former girlfriend of David Letterman. Some may find themselves more prepared to listen to a person who has graduated from that unexclusive infatuation.

And the essential value of Markoe's rib-tickling survey of current entrepreneurial attempts at playing Cupid is that she endorses none of them.

She is a nutritional critic at the fatty smorgasbord of self-help.

Markoe, a four-time Emmy Award-winning TV writer, can chart us infallibly around the shoals of passion classes, tele-psychics and weekend retreats because she has been there, done that and emerged pretty much intact - as a dog lover.

They're safer, but they're also instructive.

Perpend:

``People yearn for love. They beg and weep and whimper for love. Until an actual human being comes into their life and wants something from them.

``Then they weep and whine and groan about how much love hurts and how messed up they are now and how much better off they were alone.''

Like dogs and automobiles.

``First they cry because they want to get in to the car. Then, as soon as the car starts to move, they cry because they want to get out. And, of course, as soon as they get out, all they want is to get back in as soon as possible.''

There you have it.

Markoe provides an important money-saving consumer service in sharing the basically bogus services of love channelers, potion peddlers and others in the contemporary eros racket.

She notes that, contrary to the received wisdom of Love Story, love does not mean never having to say you're sorry.

It means having to say you're sorry over and over and over again.

Not the message of psychotherapist Pat Allen, who reports that making eye contact is key to success in flirtation, or mixer superintendents Bonnie and Donny, who believe self-affirming mantras are the way to a lasting relationship. (Hey, if you love yourself, aren't you already halfway there?)

Then there's Ross Jeffries' Basic Speed Seduction Home Study Course, which seems to suggest women are supremely attracted to male stupidity.

Would that they were.

Markoe offers such useful chapters as ``Tips on Dating a Crazy Person'' (do unto him/her as he/she would have you do unto him/her), ``Love and Sex on the Astral Plane'' (fly the friendly skies) and ``Looking Forward to Disappointment'' (never order vegetables at a burger joint).

She even examines the bromidic injunctions of Hallmark:

All the time

No matter how I'm acting

on the outside

I'm loving you

on the inside.

``Of course,'' the author intones, ``that's the approach O.J. Simpson used, and we all know how that turned out.''

But Markoe isn't all flip negativity.

She does provide a valuable and time-tested formula of her own for finding unconditional affection.

``All you will need,'' Markoe confides, ``is patience, a backyard, and a tolerance for free-floating clumps of hair.`` MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia

Wesleyan College.

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