Relationships fail. They fall apart about as swiftly as your most recent attempt to attend all your classes, eat your veggies and lay off the Coors Light.

Most earnest attempts at a meaningful relationship in college are fruitless: Locating - and connecting - with someone worth more than those bargain-bin sandals you acquired from Target is like finding a paid internship: nearly impossible.

Why do those “glimmer of light” relationships with so much promise and hope disintegrate into confused, gut-wrenching caricatures of what they once were? Your mom - master of all clichéd knowledge - knows the answer: “There are a lot of fish in the sea.”

Guess what, my friend: You are a trout, and your loved one has not yet tasted the perch, salmon, orange roughy, mud puppy and a few shrimp, for good measure. You were dumped because you are old news, and the new edition just walked by in a halter top.

On a daily basis, legions of one-half of a couple are unwillingly handed their membership card to the lonely hearts club. They are welcomed to the society with awe-inspiring lines like: “I don’t want to ruin our great friendship,” “I love you like a sister/brother,” “I love you, but I’m not in love with you” and “I have a job in Lansing; I can’t handle the long-distance thing.”

Anyone who has been on the receiving end of this drivel knows the love of their life is more full of manure than the East Lansing air around mid-June. For some reason, however, they can never quite pinpoint the actual reason they were dropped quicker than a Friday morning class.

Wake up from your heartbroken stupor, put down the Kleenex, dust yourself off and admit it. Admit to yourself what your friends, roommates, parents, professors, the guy who sells you your smokes, your neighbors three doors down and that one guy you always bump into but never remember his name know.

He wanted to sow his college oats one last time before domesticity. She wanted to see if she could land someone just a wee bit better than you before throwing in the towel and settling. They both wanted to revel in wild nights of singledom and hope that, when the dust settles and they are left feeling guilty, cheap and a little lonely, you will run back into their arms wielding affection, adoration and maybe some Tide (you see, all their bar clothes are dirty).

This is not love. Being young is no excuse to waste someone’s time for one year, two years or however long that model boyfriend or girlfriend of yours kept you wrapped up in a web of mutual trust, respect and tenderness. Not to mention the three months or more you will spend pining away for her cute stuffed animal collection that totals around 346 or the neatly stacked pile of porn on the back of his toilet.

It is unfair to your psychological well-being to hang on to someone who no longer wants you - and, I digress - does want very much to see other people.

While you brood over the injustice that has been done to you, worthier candidates zip by you on the sidewalk and stare wistfully at you from the other end of Country Markett. Your love, your life, the man or woman you equated all your hopes and dreams with was the wrong choice, a bad decision.

You were not what they were looking for, or else something new, a touch of different, would have never entered their thoroughly monogamous mind. I, too, have been the recipient of a passport to “I don’t love you anymore.” Unfortunately, everyone but my parents’ cat and I saw that I was entrenched in the most dysfunctional relationship of the century. It wasn’t love. I don’t think it could even be classified as “like.” I held on for dear life though, because I had invested in this man; I had hoped, prayed and séanced for three years that he would love me like I thought I loved him.

I was wrong.

I mourned for a year and a half; I spent too much money, drank too many vodka gimlets and made far too many 3 a.m. “why don’t you love me anymore” phone calls.

One day, I stopped. Just like that. I vowed to be alone and like every liberating single-life minute of it. Nearly the very next day my current boyfriend Adam walked across the street and introduced himself as my neighbor.

Gladly, my liberated woman vow went right out the window and I found someone worth all the emotions love brings. All I can think of now are those wasted years I spent on a worthless relationship - save yourself from the same, debilitating fate.

You were dropped on your butt, and that hurts more than just your tailbone. You are allowed to cry, burn certain mementos and aimlessly drive your car for hours on end listening to “In Your Eyes.”

You are not allowed, however, to erect a pedestal for your former flame and place him or her on it as your last chance for relational bliss. Chalk him up to bad judgment, blame her on temporary insanity, put a fork in them and declare it officially done.

Pull out your canoe, brandish your rod, a sixer and a fair amount of bait: You’ve got fishing to do.

Kathryn Garvale, an interdisciplinary humanities senior, can be reached at garvalek@msu.edu.