You know...

The more crazy crap I hear from my students-in-relationships, the gladder I am I'm still single.

The latest: a student turning in a lab book (later than I would have liked it but still within the official deadline time). He apologized for not being here earlier but said that "bad stuff went down last night." He didn't explain too much but it apparently involved his fiancee, and her going out drinking, and him having to drive to a place over an hour away to get her because of said bad-stuff (and because she'd been drinking).

Oh, I know, not all relationships are like that, but man. If I were engaged to some dude, and late one night he called me up from far away where he and his buddies had been bending the elbow, and he was drunk and bad stuff was going down, and he said I needed to come get him, I'm not sure that I wouldn't say instead, "Hire a taxi, dude, I'm sleeping." (Or at least I'd say it if it were a regular occurrence; everyone deserves a bad mess-up or two. And if it were a regular occurrence? Not only would he be needing to find a taxi; he'd be needing to find a new girlfriend.)

If you're old enough to be engaged I think you're old enough not to pull crap like that on your intended. It seems - from what I've seen this semester - this guy is well, a little bit whipped, and his fiancee is taking advantage of him.

And I don't know what it is - a fear of being alone, a need to be with someone - but I see an awful lot of people who get involved in these difficult, life-complicating relationships and then it seems like they're always running around playing catch-up in the other areas of their lives because the person they're with is such a time-vampire.

And I really do NOT need that. As I've said before, I'd be open to being in a relationship but only if the chap concerned were sane and fairly independent and someone who didn't need me (figuratively) to tie his shoes and pack a lunch for him every morning...in other words, a grown-up with a life apart from mine, who wants to share that life with me. Not someone who wants to graft on to my life because he lacks one of his own; not someone who wants me to give up the life I have because he "needs" me.