I hate it when people ask me why I’m still single, like it is 100 percent a choice I’ve proactively made. I don’t go around asking people why in the hell they’re in a relationship.

I usually just shrug and say I don’t know, but that ends right now. I’ve prepared a list of ways you can answer the question, many of which will stump the other person and/or make them feel at least slightly uncomfortable.

1. I was born this way.
2. Why aren’t you single?
3. I can only afford a prostitute one night every fiscal quarter. There’s no way I could spring for a full-time girlfriend.
4. I have yet to find a girl who can shoot scotch out of her nipples.
5. Why are boobs good? Why are bushes bushy? Why does the Westboro Baptist Church have members? Why do kids like Apple Jacks? Some things just happen.
6. I’m too busy with work.
7. My crippling addiction to porn has been damaging my social life.
8. WELL WHY DON’T YOU JUST GO AHEAD AND ASK HER? [Point at a random woman somewhere near you.]
9. There was…there was a shark attack.
10. Why? You want a shot at the title?
11. My standards are way too high for someone of my financial and social status.
12. Probably because I refuse to take socks off during sex.
13. I like Nickelback and am really, really vocal about it.
14. None of your business. Why don’t you go f**k yourself? Wait. You don’t have to. Because you have somebody to do that with. Frownie face.
15. Because I have yet to meet one dude in my entire life who hasn’t gotten married and then later told me how lucky I am to still be single.
16. I watch Game of Thrones, so I know that weddings are often bad, bad news.
17. My puppy is not really a people person.
18. Your mom refuses to commit to me, that’s why.
19. Well, I generally work pretty late on weeknights, and when I’m not supposed to sometimes things come up and I have to stay after hours, which means I have to cancel plans, and I feel like a dick when I do that, so I just don’t make them. Then on the weekends I play Dungeons & Dragons so there isn’t a lot of time for hanging out with broads.
20. Are you familiar with the concept of alimony?
21. Well, I’m paying a great deal of alimony at the moment, which has done a great job of sapping most of my funds, to a point where I’m worried I’ll even have a roof over my head by the end of next month, and as such I do not have disposable income to throw at another round of “will he ultimately end up heartbroken and having to pay alimony?”
22. [Stare balefully at them until they walk away.]
23. “The white whale tasks me; he heaps me. Yet he is but a mask. ‘Tis the thing behind the mask I chiefly hate; the malignant thing that has plagued mankind since time began; the thing that maws and mutilates our race, not killing us outright but letting us live on, with half a heart and half a lung.” Captain Ahab said that, you know.
24. I suppose I’m just sort of into being single, seeing double, and making triple.
25. If I cease being single, that means I’m one step closer to being married, and if I get married then there is like a 50 percent chance that it will end in divorce. If you stay single forever, you’ll never be disappointed…right?
26. Because you haven’t hooked me up with any of your beautiful friends yet.
27. I feel like I missed my initial window of opportunity for coupling up, so now I’m biding my time until my early 30s when the first wave of divorcees start to trickle in.
28. I apologize, what was it you just said? I was distracted. I was perusing all of the fine trim up in this joint tonight.
29. Because I’ve been unhappy in one way or another for years, and don’t want to subject someone else to my problems. Nor do I want someone else to be the reason I become happy again. I’m going to do this alone, then I’ll figure out the whole mating thing. Maybe.
30. Because f**k you, that’s why.