One night stands (ONS) can be great or a complete nightmare; and the worst part is you probably won’t know which of these it is before it’s too late.

Between the experiences of my friends and myself, I’ve been able to come up with some pretty good ways to decide if going home with Mr. Wonderful is a good decision or not. If your friends are not around to give you the thumbs up or thumbs down, perform the following checks.

If you answer the following questions with “Yes,” you should probably go your separate ways for the evening. Is his collar popped? Does he have any broken limbs? Does he have a twin brother you could have possibly confused him with? Would the walk to his place take more than three minutes? Is his hair perpendicular to the floor? Did he introduce himself with the tool bag nickname his friends gave him? Is he drinking a pink mixed drink?

If you answered “no” to all those questions, it should help you avoid any REALLY bad experiences, but I can’t make any promises. If you still can’t decide, you can ask me.

You’ll thank me for the “would the walk to his place take more than three minutes?” evaluation. When you wake up in your party dress with your make-up streaked down your face and horrified with what is next to you, the walk will be over shortly and hopefully before anyone can see you. If you ignored the consequences of that question, I have no sympathy and I’ll probably laugh at you when I see you walking. If you’re planning on staying at the beach, make sure you have some money for a cab. You may get lucky and find a nice gentleman that will drive you home in the morning, but prepare for the worst.

Before your next one night stand, remember one thing — Fairfield is a pretty small school. When there are less than 4,000 students, you are bound to run into your hook-up pretty much everywhere you go.

You may not have ever seen them before, but I can promise you they will be all over the place after the rendez-vous. And of course, you will only run into them when you are not looking your best — like on the way back from the gym, stuffing your face in Barone, or panting as you’re walking up the Dolan Hill.

When running into a one-night stand around campus, it’s probably going to be really awkward. Just accept it.

By the time you’ve gaped at him long enough to affirm that it’s really him, he’ll have noticed that you’re staring. At that point you might as well say hi and hope for the best. If you can’t remember his name or he is walking with another one of your ONS — you might want to reevaluate your life.

So I wish you good luck. And I hope that your beer goggles never allow you to make any truly terrible decisions.