HE can’t afford the ring. He wants to quit smoking first. He hates the idea of tarnishing your sacred love with something as “common” and “legally binding” as a piece of paper.

Hooey . . . all of it.

“If you really want to get married, you deserve that,” says the happily wedded Lori Uscher-Pines, a 29-year-old public health researcher at Johns Hopkins University and author of “The Get-Your-Man-to-Marry-You Plan: Buying the Cow in the Age of Free Milk,” out tomorrow.

She doesn’t define “milk” as just nookie, either.

“If your ultimate goal is a ring on the finger, it’s not only about the sex,” she says. “Free milk is benefits that a man gets from having a wife.”

So The Post gave Uscher-Pines our own ultimatum: Give us the Top 5 mistakes women make, and the Top 5 strategies they get right – or it’s over between us.

She obliged, and it was better than snuggling. Plus, we felt really pretty inside!