I’ve been single for a year now. It’s nice.

Nobody monitors when I go to sleep, to class or… I’ve been single for a year now. It’s nice.

Nobody monitors when I go to sleep, to class or to work. My room has been my room; no one else’s crap has been scattered around. I haven’t been keeping tabs on anybody or even really caring.

Now, something horrible has happened.

Someone has come along who is too good to pass up. I’m screwed. It’s over. I didn’t ask for this. But now I’m distracted and tired, harboring the unfortunate and embarrassing sideways smile of new romance. It’s impossible to hide it.

It appears as if the time has come to let all this happen again — all the difficulty and potential and kinetic pain, invasion of the privacy and solitude I’ve really learned to love over the past year. This is going to be exhausting.

There is, of course, the option to just not date. By some strange planetary alignment, however, that’s just not the best thing to do. Good things, in this sense, happen so rarely that one has to take advantage of them or get left behind.

So, yeah, things are pretty shaken up. If this business of dating causes so much difficulty, why do we continue to do it to ourselves?

I’ll be the first to admit that I suck at dating. I know a lot of people who are inept at it as well.

We make bad judgments, ascribe more or less quality to character than is really there, mask our insanity until it’s too late, give away the milk for free and then act surprised when the cow doesn’t sell.

Our ideas about sex have also been perverted, and this is reflected in our dating lives. “Girls Gone Wild” is a normal part of the infomercial schedule on cable. Every night at 3 a.m. we see those wild coeds humping each other and it affects us, whether we know it or not. “Spring Break Cancun” is not normal behavior either. Really, it’s not.

We’ve been working on the skills of dating for years now. No one seems to get any better at it; it isn’t something that seems to favor improvement or proficiency. There are some real winners attached to the dating continuum, all stuck in the gravity of humiliation’s black hole.

Many need alcohol or substances to feel comfortable enough to talk to the opposite sex. It seems like, at this point, all sub-standard behavior is instantly forgiven under the cackling veil of inebriation. People feel less accountable for their behavior when they can blame it on induced changes in the psychological current. It still counts, though.

One of my personal favorite dating discrepancies is when a person is questioning his or her sexuality while trying to date someone conventionally.

Decide if you like guys or girls or whatever combination or percentage that may entail. Either way is fine, just get back into dating after the soul-search comes to an end. During times of wavering or transforming sexuality, dating should be kept to a minimum. I think this scenario is a lot more common than it seems.

Immaturity is also a big road-block. Not that immaturity isn’t great, but it’s preferable as a part-time affair. I tend to ascribe to a three-year sliding scale of maturity. If someone’s numerical age is, for example, 20, her actual age is probably between 17 and 23. That’s a pretty wide range of attitudes and levels of maturity. Basically, it’s hard to tell how old someone really is.

The first stages of dating entail a great loss of sleep to account for all-night conversations and schedule-welding. You claim not to be tired and press on, squeamish, nervous and awkward. It’s exhausting, but exciting.

So it seems as if nobody’s actually good at dating, although just about everybody partakes in it. We’ve all had our share of miserable attempts and embarrassments. It doesn’t seem to get any easier, though.

E-mail a transient Rachel Chunko at [email protected].