There’s nothing quite like singlehood to make you feel like a social pariah, no experience as fraught with self-pity as watching the endless sea of couples around you and secretly clamoring to join them (and, of course, longing to finally change your relationship status on Facebook). Friends and acquaintances saunter past your single, solitary self, significant others perpetually affixed to their arms, while your own limbs remain painfully, obviously bare. The perks of a relationship are just too great to ignore. Not only are you guaranteed a date to every major school dance, but you also have a person you can whip out at the appropriate opportunity, offering the world solid, undeniable proof that you are not a loner.

But first you have to find someone to be in a relationship with. And the instant you stop obsessively searching for potential relationship candidates, the very instant you’re inclined to throw in the towel altogether, the right person stumbles into your path at the right time. Before you know it, the two of you are walking around the hallways with your hands superglued together, hardly daring to believe your good fortune. You’re inseparable in every sense of the word, so closely connected that splitting you apart would probably cause an explosive nuclear reaction, so close that you’ve practically become a single entity.

And suddenly, life seems so wonderful. How did you never notice that before? You wake up each day with a huge smile spread across your face and a million plans regarding the future.

You laugh at all the times you considered yourself in love before, knowing now, with all the wisdom of newfound experience, that you were terribly mistaken. That was childish infatuation, little more than a series of meaningless crushes. This is something greater than that, something simultaneously genuine and bewildering and fascinating—something Real. The bonds you share simply cannot be broken—they’re so strong that they transcend the boundaries of mere emotion and enter the realm of powerful chemical attraction. What’s the term for that, anyway? Ionic? Covalent? Whatever. You’re sure you’d know the answer if you actually paid attention in Chemistry, but lately, your mind has been preoccupied with other matters.

Time passes in a jolly sort of way, and life is good—better than ever before, in fact. You’re confident that your current state of affairs will last forever.

Then one evening, the unthinkable happens—instead of filling up with your nightly bombardment of text messages, your inbox remains mysteriously blank. You’re sure there must be some kind of mistake at first—your service is malfunctioning, perhaps, or else your clock is set to the wrong time zone. Yet you can’t quite shake the unsettling feeling that a more unwelcome force is in play. You lie awake well into the early hours of the morning, staring at the rectangular patch of cellphone light so intensely that the words "No New Messages" permanently burn themselves into your retinas. And gradually it dawns on you—it’s an undeniable sign that things aren’t Meant To Be.

And sure enough, the next time you see each other, something has changed in a subtle yet perceptible way. The magnetic attraction is gone; the only real spark left between you is the occasional prick of static electricity. You feel a sense of impending doom, an approaching calamity of cataclysmic proportions. Three weeks and five words later, it’s over.

And suddenly, life really sucks. Your heart has been spit upon, stomped upon, shoved into a blender, and generally subjected to all manner of gross indignities. The days drag by listlessly, aimlessly, as though every ounce of happiness has been sucked out of the world. You spend your first post-breakup hours removing the "awww"-inspiring quotes from your Buddy Info and replacing them with the most depressing lyrics you can find, secretly hoping that a certain someone might yet be persuaded…

But in a few weeks, that’s all old news, for some worthier person has caught your eye, and a new conquest is yours for the making. So much to do, so little time.

It seems we have once again forgotten the simple concept of prevention.

It’s not a particularly novel idea by any means. By stopping an undesirable event from happening before it occurs, we spare ourselves from its various detriments. That’s why we don’t let kids run around with scissors: because we would run the risk of unseemly accidents. That’s why we invented the vaccine: so we could prevent diseases from becoming epidemics. Prevention makes sense conceptually, and its implementation is not impossible either. So why have we in America yet again forgotten the importance of preventative measures with regards to the pharmaceutical industry?

Because sometimes we just don’t think ahead. Scratch that—sometimes we just don’t think at all. Government research has proven, time and time again, that people with mental health issues rarely get the specialized care and diagnosis they need. And yet an obscene amount of money is spent on the treatment of these diseases which we haven’t yet cared to identify. We shouldn’t be surprised that people get overmedicated; it’s only logical that it should happen when we choose to ignore disease prevention and subsequently find ourselves with an overwhelming necessity for medication. Writes Judith Warner in The New York Times: "The notion that American children and adults are being overmedicated for exaggerated disorders has now become one of the defining tropes of our era."

And over-diagnosis has indeed become a definitive aspect of modern-day America—not only in medicine, but in the sociological sphere as well. The fact that Americans take prescription drugs all too readily may be a poignant indicator of our cultural disposition. Perhaps unthinkingly, we hurt ourselves, subconsciously thinking that we can patch it up later. And it’s not a stretch to say that this attitude has infested our society on every level possible. On the contextual level of high school students, for example, we can see a burgeoning affinity for coffee—assumedly not so much for the taste of the drink as for its voluntary sleep deprivation capabilities. But would it be such a radical idea to say that coffee, the mascot of the majority of our school’s junior population, should take a backseat to prudence and diligence? That we ought to prevent ourselves from needing this medication, so to speak, by simply doing our work earlier?

Or must we continue, students, doctors, and people in general, to bail water out of a sinking ship without thinking to plug the hole?