With Valentine’s Day here and no one to call my own for the 18th year in a row, I have decided that it is high time I change my plan of attack. Buying myself boxes of chocolate has lost its charm, and letters from secret admirers don’t titillate when they arrive in your own handwriting. But I have observed that this desperation is not confined to me alone. It is reaching epidemic proportions.

I’ve been very perturbed of late about the lack of dating at GW. Sure, the Thurstonites are getting jiggy with it day and night, and I’m not complaining about a lack of booty (for there is plenty of that here, and with the proliferation of EZ Mac its only getting bigger), but the almost complete absence of courtship. Here lies the key discrepancy between the sexes in our age. Every girl I know wants a relationship, and every boy wants a Playstation. How many times have I gathered the courage and raised my little voice to say, “I love you” only to hear in reply “do you want fries with that?” Maybe that’s my problem for hitting on all those McDonalds drive-thru window cashiers, but can’t everyone relate?

This is why I am becoming a medical student.

Medical students have it easy. It doesn’t matter that they reek of Formaldehyde from all of their dissections, because they have found their perfect soul mates: Cadavers.

You may be shocked but weighing the pros and cons of having a cadaver as a significant other against one of those “living” people, the corpse consistently comes out on top.

Cadavers love to listen. They will never tell you to “shh” or yawn while you are telling a story or interrupt your monologue. One downfall is that they never laugh at your jokes, but you get used to that.

As well as never moving their lips, cadavers, for some reason, never move at all. This character trait is most handy when you and your corpse venture out into the D.C. nightlife. With a cadaver as your date, you can rest assured that if you leave him/her at the bar to hit the little boys/girls room, you won’t come back to find that the cheating bastard has run off to get his freak on with your roommate with whom you trusted all your secrets and gave your best Steve Madden boots and all of your tank-tops and leaves wet towels on the floor. Pardon, got a little sidetracked there.

The one reason someone might have a slight aversion to dating one of these amazing people is the disconcertingly chill feel of their grasp. This can easily be averted by a quick zap with the microwave, an appliance every college student has readily available. Getting ready for a date takes less time than whipping up a trough of “It’s Pasta Anytime!” and believe it or not, you get less stares on the street when you saunter out with a dead body than when you show up at Hawk & Dove arm in arm with spaghetti (it’s been a lonely first semester).

Save time, effort and money (cadavers consume relatively little, and we all know how important meal points are) and date a cadaver. Let’s make this well-known practice more socially acceptable. Stop complaining about your non-existent social life and wine and dine a cadaver!