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Happy New Year everybody!

I know that Betty had a great New Year's eve because she e-mailed me three things she is going to do with her love life in the new year at 2:30 a.m., from a party.

She resolves to:
1. Start making the first move
2. Give men at least two minutes to make a good impression
3. Not go for the "unavailable" guy or "the guy everyone thinks is bad news."

As for mine, this blog has helped me to come up with one, which is

1. I won't let guys think I'm single because they pay more attention to me that way.

I remember the feedback I got from you readers/commenters after a late-night pool outing with a guy. I still think that men jump to conclusions and they deserve the disappointment they get for it, but I can be more honest, I guess.

2. I'm going to return to my relationship values and stop having my emotions pushed around by the WE channel.

Last night I actually asked my boyfriend "Are you going to buy me an engagement ring or should I just get it myself?" I feel like I have a strong excuse for that behavior, because I'd just watched three episodes of "Platinum Weddings." But still. We've had enough conversations and have true agreement about the kind of relationship and timetable we have. We have been to some gorgeous weddings this year and still have a few ahead of us. Soon enough, one of them will be ours. Or it won't. We'll do what we'll do.

3. Get out and meet more people.

I've been lucky in all of the places I've lived until now: Making friends outside of work has been effortless. I've been here long enough to know that's not how it's going to be here. The attempts I've made have paid off, I think. But I need to do it a lot more. Me and my b.f. have been waaaay too dependent on each other here, and it shows.

Wingfella will post his when he gets up, I guess. He must have had a great night.

What are you going to do differently in the new year? We promise this is the last holiday post we do (for a while at least). Is your resolution precipitated by an event or situation from this year you want to avoid duplicating or are you aspiring to something new this year?

Or you could share your never-fail hangover cure, but I don't believe such a thing exists.

Lately I've been giving out my phone number a little too freely. Sometimes I think I'm interested and realize later that I'm not. Sometimes I just have a hard time saying no, especially when the guy has put in the time (and possibly the money for a drink). It's, I guess, easier to hand out the number now and ignore the call later than reject someone to their face.

I used to give people a fake number but then that backfired when, in a moment of stupidity, I gave someone a fake name but the real number. Needless to say, he called and got my real name from my voicemail and proceeded to call back about five more times, presumably to call me out on my cowardice!

It's not a big deal but the next few entries from the unbuttoned crew are all about regrets. I try not to have too many, and regretting giving someone my phone number doesn't rank too high. I'm wondering though, have you ever given someone your phone number and then immediately regretted it? What should I do about my reluctance to turn people down?

Two roads diverged in a ...

whatever.

This guy was from Texas. He was fun, spontaneous, messy and had no known allergies.

We hated each other and wouldn't have spent any time together at all except for friends who kept inviting us both out. Then we went bowling one time and each of us drank a pitcher of fizzy domestic beer, then we were dating -- like something out of a romantic comedy written by Mike Judge.

Then his company moved him somewhere far away and I picked back up with the guy I had been dating before the bowling incident. The Texan kept calling and we kept talking, I thought, as friends. We made plans to hang out for a weekend, so I told him about the other guy and never heard from him again.

Things with that other guy never went anywhere and whenever I'm prone to thinking about this type of thing, like in a week that we've decided to blog about regret, I wonder what could have happened with the Texan.

I took the boyfriend more traveled by and that has made the difference.

Who cares? The past is past, right? But everybody has someone they wish they hadn't let go. Or maybe you had someone you wish you had let go much sooner.

Tell us about it.

So you have that one gal who, if you could just get the guts, might give you a bit of time. Yet, somehow you can't move the relationship from buddy-buddy to lover-lover.

After a night of beers with the boys, you call her. It's late, but not too late, and you bet she might want to come over and "hang out" or "watch a movie" or whatever it is you've done before (like legitimately hang out, watch movies, and such). Though this time you could also make out some.

Personal experience with this type of situation says this: don't do it. If the person is not someone who you would call while you're sober for the reason that you're calling while buzzed, it's a terrible idea.

I've had a couple drunk dials over the years, and they generally end up in catastrophe of some sort or another. Sometimes it's immediate, like when she says to never call her again, particularly in a drunken stupor. Other times it's long-range, like the girl who you know wants you that you keep blowing off until sometime when you're half-cocked. Then you call her, validate her previously unrequited feelings and now have a stalker.

All these things have happened to me. Moral: don't drunk dial. Never.

But who really listens to their own advice? Not me. Part of being a guy includes a base level of stupidity, and therefore, we're prone to some Class-A Dumb Stuff. Or real fun.

More than once in the past few weeks, a guy I've met has forgone the requisite phone call to ask for a first date (or a second date) and instead has sent me a text message.

On the one hand, I welcome it. There's no awkward phone conversation or voicemail message. I can think about my response for as long as I like. On the other hand, he can also take as long as he wants crafting a response. And that's not fun.

After all, the waiting's the hardest part.

I wonder, when I'm having a conversation with the man I'm supposed to be dating via text message, where's the honesty? The voice inflection that signals to you that he's the kind of guy you should go on a date with?

I often use text messageing to avoid uncomfortable conversations. So, in that case, is text messaging just a cop out?

A guy friend came to me looking for some advice. He has a friend, a girl, with a problem he wants to help out with, but he's worried that his honest answer to the problem might be a bigger problem for him than the girl's issue in the first place.

I guess he thinks if he tells her how hot he thinks she is, she'll think he's into her, which, I guess, he's not.

The girl is frustrated because she feels neglected by men. She goes out with a pack of girls and regularly finds herself the only one not dancing with someone, not talking to someone... nothing.

So she posts something kind of desperate to her myspace page: "What's wrong with me?"

I, for one, have an easy answer for the girl: You're not acting trashy enough. Remember high school and "she's just doing that for attention"? That's the kind of thing you need to do to get attention in a meat market-type bar. If you want a guy's intellectual attention, look for one in a library or something.

But I'm more interested in the help we can give my friend. How can he give her a thoughtful and true answer without either encouraging her to pursue his affection or making her think he's into her. Either one of these would make his friendship with her awkward.

How can he tell her precisely what he thinks of her, which, presumably, will make her feel better, without suggesting to her that he feels more for her?

Admit it. You have some sort of test that you give to a new date to see if things are going to work out. I don't mean watch how he treats the waitress or if she brings up her ex. I mean a situation that you deliberately contrive at some point to say, "if this guy/chick can't deal with this, I can't deal with him/her."

Mine always comes up early. I have a lot of guy friends and I like to be really social and I need to have friendships that are separate from my relationship. So that means that I have to be able to to hang out, stay out late, drink beer, and occasionally crash on the couch of a guy and not have my boyfriend get angry or hurt.

Do I mean hook up with? no. I mean what normal people do with a friend.

It's a tall order, sure, but some women want diamonds and furs. And if I'm the only girl a guy hangs out with, it scares me.

So I bring dates to bars or parties where I'll be with other guys who have been clearly identified as friends (now not too soon, I'm not evil). If there are signs of jealousy in neutral situations, I don't wait around to test his patience with the more volatile ones.

For some women I know, it is marriage or children, so she'll come up with a way to see him interact with babies. I have a divorced and remarried friend who says "the second wife always sails."

What situations do you put dates into to see if they can handle a relationship with you?

Preface: I know the amount of ridicule I deserve to get for posting something like this.

Has anybody else been channel surfing late an insomniac night and stumbled across the "adult" hour of the home shopping network? Did anybody else find it hypnotic, sort of like a battery powered, silicone, life-like, pink lava lamp? Or maybe a little bit like "The Joy of Painting?"

The devices themselves look like what would happen if you took an MIT contest to make a better-than-human mechanical body part and dunk it in a vat of estrogen. Estrogen or the pure, distilled essence of Lisa Frank.

That paired with the saleswomen/announcers/hosts, the creative ways they came up with to describe the devices' function and their effusive praise -- I couldn't look away.

When I started writing this post, I didn't have a goal for it. But now I've looked at the home shopping network programming guide and find no reference to this show that I'm sure I saw. I used the Home Shopping Network's site to search for a couple of the products I saw advertised. No dice.

But please, somebody tell me that I'm not the only person in the world who has watched this show.

This was several years ago.

The relationship was odd and filled with numerous instances of untruth, lying and hiding things. She was someone who would get depressed and go weeks in that state, followed by good times. It was like she'd get some black thought and couldn't shake it.

I'm a supportive guy. And I can handle others' burdens well. We all have our mountain to climb, too. Problems of any stripe, whenever they occur, are the problems that are most important at that time.

This gal, as far as I know, was chemically imbalanced and on-and-off took prescription medicine for it. And I wanted out. Think of me what you will, but I couldn't handle the high highs and low lows. And there were other factors there, like her tendency to blow small things out of proportion and be unapologetically evil.

But knowing that she was depressive (which is different than suicidal, I know), I had to time the breakup. When people break up, they often can say that they had a feeling that it was coming for a long while. This was one of those situations. My only one, really, because I wanted to make sure I didn't drop it on her when she was in the middle of one of her dark phases.

Any of you had to tiptoe around something like that?

FYI: These days I hear that she's OK, and in another relationship with a good guy.

Lately I've been jumping from guy to guy or date to date with quite a bit of ease of mind. It's unusual for me, especially considering how I used to focus on guys with an almost religious fervor.

Most of the reaction I get from friends is "Good for you!" or "That's what you should be doing!" But another friend of mine, never married, in his 40s is also dating around -- three women to be exact. On one Saturday, he went out with all three of them at different times. They don't know about each other. Those same friends of mine don't receive his story nearly as well as mine.

So my question is this: At what point is dating around good and healthy and when is it a crime?

The name's Jizelle and I am not ashamed to say that I am single....again.
I am, however, ashamed to say that I may be single because I have a habit of ruining potentially good relationships before they even begin.

I'm the type of woman who meets a guy, fishes for flaws, then uses his less-than-desirable qualities or habits as an excuse to kick him to the curb. I go in for the kill early.

I'm not really sure when or where the trend of relationship sabotage began for me. Perhaps it started in ninth grade, when I broke up with a guy because he was too nice. He waited for me after every class to walk me to the next. He carried my books, never liked to argue and called every day like clockwork. So to put myself out of relationship bliss, I ended it all in a letter that I left in his locker.

In college, I stopped dating a guy cold turkey, because after dating for two months, I felt things were moving too fast. There was no real reason for me to feel this way, it was just the weapon I chose to slaughter our brief romance.

If I fastforward to more recent years, I can recall that the trend has continued with numbers of dates gone wrong and potential boyfriends who were dropped so quickly, I didn't even have a chance to get their last names.

Unfortunately, at 26, I realize that other than the tactics I use to kill off a budding relationship, not too much has changed. But if I don't want to end up an old maid with 10 cats, I've gotta learn how to allow a man to coexist in my world.

Has anyone else ever committed serial relationship sabotage? Is there a remedy?

I was talking to a friend last night about a party she went to on Saturday.

There was dancing. There was grinding. She was there by herself, and went home by herself. The going home alone part was fine; she was definitely not trying to score there (she said...).

But what we got to talking about was how it felt watching all of these people, resplendent in their PDA. She thought, *sigh* "To have someone to publicly display affection with..."

But there was a sort of cognitive dissonance between how much fun it looked like to be all horny and smashed up against another person, and her knowledge of how much fun it actually is to be in that situation.

Fun, sure, but not quite as much fun as it looked like.

So what is it that makes other people's love look so good?

If that's too abstract and random, then just laugh at this funny dinosaur cartoon.

This was in the comments of our New Year's resolutions post. It was such a good question we decided to bring it up here:

My problem seems to be not being able to get into a crowd. I moved here in 2002 and work from home.... I am having a hard time meeting a special someone, even friends overall for that matter. I still feel as if I just moved here, for I am not big pals with anyone. ...I am self-sufficient and all, but this scenario is not fun. I have a few people I know... (But) I feel now that I am not a good catch for women because I would have no "life" per se to bring to the equation presently. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to get out of this rut?

Can some other transplants tell us how you built your social group here? Or Greensboro natives, what should newcomers know about getting established in your city?

In a recent post, Billy the Blogging Poet attributes one person's romantic woes to the fact that Greensboro is simply a bad place to live if you want to meet new people. He said the person in question should think about moving (and take Census records into account). I thought I'd expand on that.

... after poisoning him with words."

That Bob Dylan line I heard last night that made me think back to last Saturday and a conversation about confidence. Only we didn't poison or kill anyone.

I caught up with a couple friends who were shooting pool and we started doing what guys do: talking about not much in particular with the subjects of women, music and food thrown in.

"I'm not all that good at talking with them," my friend said about the ladies.