The holidays suck. My sister-in-law once threw a dinner roll at my cousin’s face. It wouldn’t have been so bad, but the roll was covered in mashed potatoes and it actually stuck to my cousin’s cheek. And as if dysfunctional family issues weren’t enough, I have to hear “Still no girlfriend?” at least 20 times between Thanksgiving and New Year’s.

So this year, my new year’s resolution is simple: I want a girlfriend. From now on, whether it’s Father’s day, Christmas, or Martin Luther King day, I don’t ever want to hear that question again.  With that in mind, here are my 5 reasons why I don’t plan on spending even one more holiday as a single man:

5. Extra Wine at Thanksgiving Dinner
The sound of my family droning on for hours wouldn’t sound nearly as bad if I could only get drunk…or at least get a nice buzz going. But I can’t stress how important it is that I be sober enough to drive so I can bolt the second my desire to strangle my brother becomes uncontrollable. If I have a girlfriend, only one of us needs to stay sober, and my thought is that at her family events, I’ll be the designated driver (the last thing I need is to drunkenly call her dad a d-bag anyway), and when we’re with my family, she gets the keys and I get the booze.

4.True Love
That’s right, it’s #4. I don’t want to sound unromantic here, but there are so many things that have more tangible benefits for me than true love. Look, I think true love is important, I mean…it made the list right, but since I’ve never had anything I would call true love, I just can’t get as excited about it as I can things like the next 3 items…

3. No More Going to Bed at 10:00 on New Year’s Eve
You ever been single on New Year’s Eve and not have a single party to go to? I hate bars the way Tom Cruise hates sanity…you know, the way the Olsen twins hate food. And even when I have a party I’ve been invited to, the only thing more depressing than being alone for New Year’s is watching everybody else suck face when the ball drops. So yeah, this New Year’s Eve will find me going to bed early (and probably drunk) just because all the other alternatives make me want to beat myself to death. If I had a girlfriend, parties would be fine, and if we didn’t have one to go to, we could pop open a bottle of champagne next to a nice crackling fire and ring in the new year together.

2. A Reason to Leave Early
Holidays are a time to be with family. An while I love my family, I can only handle them so much. I mean my older sister once told me that I would never amount to anything and that I might as well start hanging out at homeless shelters because I would be forced to move into one eventually, and I “should know which one has the most comfortable beds.”

With a girlfriend at my side, I can always say “I’m sorry, [name of girlfriend] needs to get up really early tomorrow,” or “we’re going to have to take off [name of girlfriend] isn’t feeling very well. While a girlfriend should be more than just a built-in excuse, that’s a real good icing on the cake.

1. No More Incessant Nagging from My Family
Maybe some people have polite families…but as far as I’m concerned, the only places they exist are on TV Land or Nick At Night. My brother got me Lars and the Real Girl for Christmas, and in the card he wrote “I thought you could use a good ‘how-to’ video.” The first words out of my grandmother’s mouth every time I see her are “are you dating anyone yet?” And it’s the way she stretches out the word “yet” as if to say “you’ve been single for so long, if you don’t date soon, you might as well just buy yourself a walker and move into a retirement community.”

Yes, for New Year’s my resolution is to get a girlfriend. It will mean so much less static from my family, it will mean the grief they do direct at me will be dulled by a good buzz and the thought that no matter how long Christmas dinner lasts, I’ll be going home with a beautiful woman by the end of the night. Who knows, it might even lead to true love.

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