Gazing into eyes can kill you — if you’re a fictional character

This is a public service announcement, paid for by the Concerned Genre Fiction Readers of the Interwebs.

Ladies! Stop looking in people’s eyes!

32 women a year die by drowning in someone’s eyes.

More than 100 women a year experience the near-fatal depths of someone’s dark, unfathomable eyes.

4 out of 5 readers know someone who has drowned in a pair of eyes.*

THIS MUST STOP!

To curb the tide of eye-drownings, the CGFRI has put together the following suggestions to help minimize the likelihood of drowning if you or a love one find yourself in the vicinity of deep eyes.

Do an activity together: 98.3% of cases where a woman drowns in someone’s eyes occur because neither person involved had anything better to do than stare at the other person. Instead, try bowling! You’ll find with your attention on the pins and both of you moving about, the chance of a sudden rip tide pulling you in has greatly reduced. Heck, even dancing. You can rub up against each other all you want, and it’ll build all that same wonderful hot tingly stuff, without the perils of inexplicably drowning in your partners eyes.

Cultivate other interests: Try admiring his hands instead, or that nice shirt with the dashingly open collar. That’s nice, eh? Or how about that sunset tonight? Even lips are okay, I guess, since you’re probably about to kiss them anyway. Eyebrows? No! What are you thinking? That’s much too close to the edge. If you’re not careful you could slip and fall and then Search and Rescue will have to come and dredge you out. Seriously, just focus on your meal or something.

Stop describing his eyes: Maybe it’s too late for paeans about the play of light over a bowl of minestrone, but honey, it is never too late to quit describing the myriad colours, shapes, emotions, childhood traumas, hopes, fears, and dreams all swimming about in that man’s eyes. No matter how amber-honey-butterscotch-ochre they are. Seriously, just stop it.

Exercise discretion when selecting the eyes you’ll drown in: I don’t know about you, but drowning in honey sounds like a pretty horrible way to go. Likewise for drowning in someone’s deep brown eyes. I mean, what’s in there? Sludge? Sewage run-off? Either way, it doesn’t sound too swoon-worthy and it definitely doesn’t put me in the mood for sexytimes or beautiful romantic imagery of two beautiful people being beautiful (and probably naked) together. At least with a pair of blue eyes, it has some logic. There’s the whole obvious water thing, even though, yeah, I totally wasn’t blown away when you used that metaphor because — look at the statistics! This stuff is all over the place! Drowning in eyes like the sea after a storm kind of works though?

And at least…at the very least: Drown in someone’s eyes because it’s a bad thing! Not a good thing! Does it really seem like a good idea to throw yourself into the undertow of some dude’s eyes and then have him save you from it? (Double or nothing it’s done with a kiss) His eyes just tried to drown you! Which means dead! And he tried to do it! If there simply must be drowning, do it in the sexy villain’s eyes, rather than the sexy hero’s eyes. It’ll still make no sense, but it’ll be free from Unfortunate Implications and that’s a start.

This year, show your support to the victims of death by eye-drowning (the readers) by wearing a mini blindfold on your lapel.

And if you look across your dinner table and find yourself confronted with a pair of deep, dark, fathomless…steel blue…endless as the wild sea and no one around to stop me going under I felt myself sinking down down and yet oh how I wanted it I was drowning with nothing to grab hold of until–

JUST LOOK AWAY!

* And 0 out of 5 readers know an actual person who has drowned in a pair of eyes.