It’s funny, I was on an airplane recently and they play episodes of television shows. They play shows that you never really watched (but that maybe you would have watched if you spent all your nights home watching television — which none of you should be doing if you are trying to meet people).

Anyway, during that flight I caught a few episodes of How I Met Your Mother. There was something great on one of those episodes that was very funny. I would love to take credit for the idea, but of course I can’t.

On the show Doogie Howser (Neil Patrick Harris), who happens to be gay, plays “the stud.” He plays a guy who is kind of a player.

In one episode he did something he calls “the lemon law.” The lemon law is when you go out on a date with someone and after two minutes you can say “lemon law” and end the date. He actually went out on some dates on the show where he “lemon law-ed” his date.

While this was all very funny, I think there might also be something to this idea. I’d like to come up with my own version of “the lemon law” called “The Two Minute Warning.”

Think about it. How many times have you gone out on that blind date and you just knew the person wasn’t for you. The person was supposed to look like a cross between Sharon Stone and Deborah Harry, and she actually looked like cross between Big Foot and Sandy Duncan.

Whatever the reason, you know in the first two minutes that you are just wasting your time with this person. You know you have absolutely no chemistry with this person.

Now, I know some of you are going to get very upset and think, “Well you’ve got to give people a chance etc etc etc.” All of that is wonderful, and I agree that you do need to give people a chance. We’ve all, however, been on dates with people we’d like to lemon law or call a two minute warning.

Do you think maybe we could start something wherein all blind dates would be on Tuesdays or something, and on all Tuesday dates you can institute the two minute warning? The two minute warning would allow you in the first two minutes of a date to say something like, “Look, I’m not quite sure about you. You’re not quite sure about me. If we don’t like each other, we can two minute warning each other.”

Maybe we can get this idea to spread. Having an escape clause on a blind date is something that could certainly spread.

In fact, I know how many of you have escaped from dates by doing ridiculous things like paging themselves or going to the bathroom and emailing themselves. Then you sit there pretending your phone is vibrating and telling your date, “Oh my God. My dogsitter just threw up.”

I mean, people will do some really ridiculous stuff just to get out of a bad date. So maybe we should come up with a better way too end these kind of bad dates. There just might be something here.