Although I've been a dating columnist for five years now, this is the first spring I've been sans boyfriend in that entire period.  It’s been, to say the least, quite the adventure. Not because I've gone home with so many men – I haven't (no really, I haven't) – but because, dammit, I could have!  And therein lies the gem of being single: possibility.
 
Delicious, unreserved, completely guilt-free, incredibly sexy possibility.
 
In I Feel Bad About My Neck, Nora Ephron wrote that if she had known then what she knew now, she would have put on a bikini and not taken it off for the entire year she was 26.  That's the kind of attitude we should all apply to our dating lives – since, as inconceivable as it may seem to all my miserably single friends, statistics indicate that we’ll all be married and spoon-feeding infants someday. So stop complaining and embrace a state of unself-conscious exuberance, open-minded anticipation and untapped potential.
 
This means potential not just in the traditional, girl-meets-boy-on-rooftop-bar, boy-woos-girl-in-Hamptons, girl-plans-NYT-wedding-announcement way – c’mon, we announce things on blogs these days! –  but in the the-future-is-mine kind of way, which may lead to questions of what-do-you-want-to-do-for-breakfast or even Co-op-Condo-or-Jersey.  And then again, maybe it’ll lead nowhere at all ...

The thing about potential is that it's sometimes best left unrealized. Looking, flirting, even a little making out: harmless, carefree, unmessy. When you swap spit with a stranger in a dark bar after a long night out there's only visceral and voyeuristic satisfaction (look at me! I'm making out!), there's no promise of an awkward dinner to endure, no disappointingly obtuse text message conversation to decode, no last dash to Duane Reade for an EPT.

A marauding band of "kissing sluts" — those who make out freely and frequently, with no strings attached—swarming the city.  “Kissing, as a rule, is not a stereotypically slutty activity,” says my friend Courtney, 25, a banker, “so you can get away with a lot of it, with various different people, sometimes all in the same night – and that’s hot.”

It’s been a long, lingering winter – spring and summertime friskiness should be appreciated in all forms – and being a kissing slut is a fine way to do it.  Sure, it could lead sex on a park bench (or on the Jitney!).  But it might just lead to sharing French fries in a downtown diner at 5 am.  And the irony there – or perhaps the beauty of it – is that of the two, the fries could easily be sexier.
 
We like to think that we can't share extraordinary moments without obsessing about whether they'll morph into a full-blown relationship.  Of course we can! Romance exists everywhere – and the courtship dance can still be heady even if no actual 'ship occurs.  This summer, allow yourself to be exhilarated. Gather ye rosebuds, bitches.