Ah, spring is in the air and so is love. It’s like being in Iowa while farmers send crop-dusters to their fields: You can’t help but get some on you.

Everyone with a significant other is galavanting around and making a few of those without a significant other depressed and/or bitter to the point where they strangle the next happily chirping bird they see and end up in the Police Blotter for their troubles. For those people, I recommend therapy.

My god, it’s not that important to have a boyfriend or girlfriend. (Note to readers who happen to be my boyfriend: Just kidding, sweetie). For those of you better-adjusted people who, when they see smooching couples, merely think, “I am sooooo much better looking than her, and yet I have no boyfriend,” there is better dating advice than what’s given in cheap girly magazines.

I spent years in high school reading Cosmopolitan and Seventeen magazines, and my first advice to the chronically single of you out there is to forget anything they say. I know what I’m talking about – I was the biggest social clod in high school you can imagine.

I had the raw flirting skills of drywall and my idea of being really forward was to write “Good word choice!” on my crush’s paper when I peer edited in class. And god forbid any boy come within four feet of me and attempt a conversation. My standard operating procedure was to turn at least 10 shades of red and emit semi-coherent sentences that I meant to be charming and witty, but invariably came out like, “I clipped my toenails this morning.”

Cosmo’s advice is clearly unsuitable for this type of social dysfunction – flirting tips like, “Give him a sultry smile and pass him your phone number,” would have ended in disaster. I don’t know how many 10th grade girls had perfected their sultry smiles, but I certainly wasn’t one of them. I can only imagine what sort of hideous grimace I would have directed at some young man in the hopes of seducing him. It would have solved the problem of boys talking to me, that’s for sure. (“Stay away from ‘Toenail Girl!’ She looks like she has gas today!”)

I was not always so shy. In third grade, I had a crush on two boys, (who ever said crushes had to be monogamous?), and my flirting strategy was to dangle a Heath bar in front of them at lunch while saying, “Heeeeeath bar!” and then getting chased all over the playground by them at lunch recess until they caught me and took the candy bar. (I’d like to see that published in Cosmo). With this strategy, however, you run the risk that the boy, once he has gotten the candy bar, will merely run off afterwards to brag to his friends about it.

I suppose it was good I learned this lesson before boys got old enough to be interested in things other than Heath bars.

At any rate, the point is: You must not be afraid to make a complete fool of yourself. Have confidence! Now, permit me to laugh in the cynical and scornful manner of one who knows better. Join in if you wish. Anyone who has confidence does not need flirting advice, and those of you without confidence know perfectly well that any display of interest will only result in rejection. You will need to lock yourself in a nearby closet so you can die of embarrassment in peace and not hear the ringing laughter of your crush and his or her friends while they use a loudspeaker to broadcast the entire conversation to the campus and residence halls.

So what you want to do is come up with a worst-case-scenario analysis. You say to yourself, “Well, if I ask him out on a date and he gives me some excuse like, ‘I have to pluck my cat,’ I will feel temporarily humiliated, but I’ll be dead in 80 years or so anyway, so it won’t matter!” It’s all about perspective.

My last bit of advice to you is to involve yourself in many inextricable projects and organizations that involve time-consuming work. Others have given similar advice on the grounds that you will meet more people and improve your chances of finding someone who doesn’t floss her teeth with her own hair. I say it works because true romance only strikes when it is most inconvenient and when you are the busiest – kind of like the stomach flu.

Of course, if you’re not looking for true love, get sloshed at the bars, go home with someone, and while he sleeps, rummage through his personal belongings to see if he matches your personality as measured by his taste in music or senior pictures or underwear preference. Repeat this procedure until you find “The One,” or until you get caught and end up in the Police Blotter next to the bird stranglers.