Published: February 26, 2009

This Valentine’s Day, I sat around and wrote a poem:

Roses are red, violets are blue

No one loves me… soon no one will love you.

Sorry, is that depressing? I don’t mean to depress you, my sweet readers. I only mean to tell you guys this: shut up, you make me sick.

As the days slowly wane on this, my sunset semester at Fordham, I enjoy taking the time to sit by a window, sip on a few mugs of hot whiskey and quietly contemplate my life. In the course of this drunken reflection, I have come to realize that an unusual number of people in my peer group are in romantic relationships—angsty, passionate and ultimately doomed romantic relationships.

Now, while I love watching Jack and Kate bicker, weep and mentally undress each other on “Lost” every week (they are soooo meant to be together!!!1!1), I unfortunately don’t have the same level of interest in the public giggling, screaming, groping, avoiding or baby-making adventures of any of you.

One reason for this aversion is simply because of the fact that most of you guys are going to break up anyway. (Unlike Jack and Kate, who are soooo meant to be together!!1!11)

According to a 2004 study by University of Texas at Austin, almost 40 percent of women who graduated in the years leading up to 1955 met their first spouses in college, but that number has now dropped to around 15 percent. And with online dating services, longer bachelorhoods and swelling numbers of career women chipping away at the trend of marrying young, the number will be even lower soon.

Way I see it, there will be a few points in the near future when you will become aware of shortcomings in the person you now “love with every fiber of your being.”

Two weeks after graduation, your significant other with take his English or performance art or film studies degree and hightail it back home to New Jersey or Long Island because he’d signed up for the life of a starving artist, but the actual life of a starving artist is lacking in certain respects (food). Two things will then happen to your life: (1) either you’ll learn to live with his hovering Catholic mother, whose heart you’re breaking with your shameful, pre-marital sex or (2) your roommates will plot to kill you because your boyfriend sleeps over every night and eats all the Cheez-Its when he gets high.

If living together doesn’t drive you apart, just wait ‘til your significant other become a bartender or starts working in his parents’ pizza shop or rediscovers the art of binge-drinking or couch-potatoing or hot-rod-restoring with his old high school buddies. You will break up with your partner because it is obvious to anyone who can see that his new beer gut, neck beard or her tramp stamp that his or her life is going nowhere.

One important thing to keep in mind while continuing this relationship with your man or woman is that he or she will have no money. And let me just tell you: Feifei Ling likes pretty things bought for her by people that are not Feifei Ling. While it may be fun to buy presents for your special buddy now and then, the romance dies quickly when you’re continuously asked to supply him or her with toilet paper, booze or tampons. With every “Can you get this one, babe?” you’ll feel less like a love partner and more like a fleshy ATM. Unfortunately for Cupid, most people just don’t enjoy feeling used.

Maybe, if your love is everlasting, it’ll be over a year before the next lifestyle change affects you. In a year, your lover will wake up from his or her Camel Light-PBR-sweatpants-induced fog and finally realize how he’s just wasted a massive amount of his life, and he’ll apply for law school, at which point you’ll realize that he’ll be making six figures on the blood of innocent AIDS-infected African babies. No self-respecting vegan, tree hugging, feminist, bleeding-heart, environmental activist like yourself can be involved with a corporate lawyer! You’ll freak, call him a sell-out and kick him to the curb.

Now, I know that this has been hard to read—to write so artfully and truthfully on such a tender topic pains me almost as much as it pains you to recognize the genius of my words. The lesson, sweet readers, is that the things that work in college won’t always work in the real world. Don’t take it too hard if you lose friends or lovers after graduation. It happens to everyone—except me, because I have no friends or lovers to speak of. Just wait, though, in three months, I’ll totally be happier than you.