Cute little story in today's Times about how budding relationships can often fall apart due to just one thing - where you live.

Spring is here and the restaurants will soon be filled with anxious and hopeful couples, ordering wine, dusting off their most luminous lies, thinking they might finally have found love.

Then they will see their dates’ homes for the first time. And suddenly some of them will realize that they cannot be with this person a moment longer — or at the very latest, because that wine was not cheap, beyond the next morning.

Matt Heindl, who is 34 and does Internet marketing, remembers two terrible dating experiences.

The second experience involved an artist who lived in an East Village tenement. As he entered her apartment, a free-flying parrot relieved itself on his head. Then a large rabbit darted out from somewhere and licked his feet. A baby gate separated a second rabbit from the first — there had been a nasty penis-biting episode, his date explained.

More: It’s Not You, It’s Your Apartment - By Joyce Wadler, The New York Times