Ladies! You live in the modern age–so you can have a "modern man" in your lives!

And according to this article in the New York Times's self-help section titled "27 Ways to Be a Modern Man," he's a doozy. Here are some of the 27 wonderful traits that will make you yearn to rush out so you can have your very own attentive, caring "modern man" around your house:

1. When the modern man buys shoes for his spouse, he doesn’t have to ask her sister for the size. And he knows which brands run big or small.

4. The modern man doesn’t cut the fatty or charred bits off his fillet. Every bite of steak is a privilege, and it all goes down the hatch.

17. Does the modern man have a melon baller? What do you think? How else would the cantaloupe, watermelon and honeydew he serves be so uniformly shaped?

Mmm, a man who knows my shoe size in every brand, prefers itsy-bitsy dainty "fillets" of beef to those crude 20-ounce T-bones, and owns his very own melon-baller! What more could a girl wish for?

And then, of course, there's his softer side:

20. On occasion, the modern man is the little spoon. Some nights, when he is feeling down or vulnerable, he needs an emotional and physical shield.

26. The modern man cries. He cries often.

And he wouldn't be writing for the New York Times if he didn't possess this trait:

25. The modern man has no use for a gun. He doesn’t own one, and he never will.

Bet those students at Umpqua Community College were thrilled that "modern men" were operating a "gun-free" campus for them so there was no one around to protect their classmates from slaughter.

But just because the "modern man" is a gun-free zone like Umpqua, that doesn't mean he can't be a knight in shining armor:

16. The modern man lies on the side of the bed closer to the door. If an intruder gets in, he will try to fight him off, so that his wife has a chance to get away.

Well, at least he tries. Run, wife, run!

Now, I don't know whether this self-help article, by someone named Brian Lombardi who lives in DeKalb, Ill., is an Onion-style parody of every icky 21st-century hipster/metrosexual male trait or not. But I do know one thing:

I want me a "modern man"!