Sleeping with a person you know you have no future with can be fine for awhile. The weather’s cold, I’m living alone these days, so why don’t you just come over and distract me. These rationales can hold up for quite some time, but they’ll eventually crumble and leave you feeling more alone than you did before you found a warm body. Sleeping with someone who doesn’t get you, isn’t a part of your tribe, can be the loneliest feeling in the world. You might as well spoon two body pillows and watch porn underneath the covers. There’s less guilt when it’s over.

If you sense yourself falling for someone who, for lack of a better term, is a booty call, you need to stop calling that booty. Certain relationships have firm and inflexible definitions, and when you attempt to redefine it, it usually ends terribly. You’ll work so hard to get someone to look at you in a different way, to put you in a different kind of box, but it often never works. All you’ll feel is their coldness. You won’t remember the sex. You’ll just remember the moment they pulled away afterward.

If someone doesn’t make you laugh, they need to get out of your bed. Intimacy requires a sense of playfulness and if your partner can’t get to that level, it’s time to stop and look elsewhere. Sex is messy and hilarious. Laugh at my O face! Laugh at my clavicle! Laugh at my penis! (JK, don’t do that. I will F R E A K out.)

Stop hooking up with someone if it can’t happen during the daytime or when you’re sober. You shouldn’t be able to sum up a relationship by just saying “Those hook ups were sponsored by booze and regret.” When you’re always with someone in an altered state, you’re making them into whoever you want them to be. You’re blurring out the edges, altering their personality, because you refuse to take them as they are. Being drunk allows you to pretty much sleep with anyone because it will all feel and look the same—like a hazy numbness that has swallowed your body whole and given you a sporadic jolt of electricity.

Stop hooking up with someone if you always want to leave the second you finish. “Why do they call it cumming when everyone just leaves afterward?” There are way too many people out there for you to waste your time on someone who feels like a stranger. GET OUT OF THAT BED AND INTO SOMETHING MORE REAL ASAP!