I feel like wine drinkers are the best women to start a relationship with. Now, I don’t mean wine enthusiasts, connoisseurs, or [shudder] viticulturalist. No, I’m talking about drinkers. The kind of woman who at 2:30 in the morning will look at you with bleary eyes and a purple smile before shoving her Merlot tongue down your throat until the taste of her last glass of Yellow Tail is pervading your entire head; a woman who measures her nights not in bottles.

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This, in my experience, is the best way to know that a person is truly living in the moment. Someone who gulps life instead of kindly sipping. Diving into a relationship is not a task for the weak hearted. You have to be willing to forget for a moment all of your past heartache and suffering. You have to fight against forces as strong as evolution.

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Humans have scurried their way up the food chain in large part because we can predict the future based on the past. After watching your tribesman get eaten by a tiger after the bush rustled, you learn to avoid rustling bushes. But some people are able to throw out the cold disheartening ghosts of relationships past and start anew with reckless abandon.

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Which brings me back to my ideal woman; with flush cheeks almost matching the color of the stain on her dress. The wine drinking woman knows all too well that feeling at 8 AM when the nitrates coursing through your blood try to explode out your eyes, of tasting wine in reverse, and cursing your own mother for bringing you into a world that allows suffering of this degree. Yet next week as she peruses the grocery store trying to decide the night’s plan, my eyes are drawn to her bending over straight kneed as she struggles to fill both hands with bottles.

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Too often the beginning of a relationship is marred by the concentrated ill will felt toward every ex you can still remember; suddenly every night spent curled in the fetal position comes rushing back to you. I know I’m guilty of it, lying in bed as cold morning light crawls across the wall; with nude perfection pressed against me I wonder to myself what her face will look like as she spits out my name between fucks and yous. Will that adorable dimple in her cheek be visible as she screams obscenities at me? I bet her eyes will really pop with tears streaming down her face.

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But then she’ll turn to me and flash a smile with teeth as purple as the toilet bowl is about to become and suddenly, I’m comforted. I know even as I torment myself with what the end could look like, she’s simply drinking me in. The only way you know someone can truly love like they’ve never been hurt is by watching them drink like they’ve never had a hangover.