Congratulations on the acquisition of your new girlfriend! You have many exciting months, perhaps even years, ahead of you with your partner, and she’s guaranteed to bring you at least a modicum of personal happiness and self-confidence during the life of the relationship. But like every quality product, your new girlfriend has a few quirks you’ll need to keep in mind to get the most out of her, like how you have to kind of jiggle the handle on your favorite car’s door to get it to open right. So what can you expect from your new girlfriend? What kinds of eccentricities will she bring to your loving, committed, and potentially dramatic relationship?

Your girlfriend will send you stupid things via the internet. She gets about 90% of her entertainment from reading memes online, and you are going to be the lucky recipient of the few she finds really funny. Don’t worry, she has a very intelligent and discerning sense of humor – they really will be fucking hilarious. The best reaction to this is to pretend she wasn’t trying to send you something funny at all, but rather trying to strike up an intellectual conversation, as though she’d sent you an article about particle physics. Send something funny back, with a witty caption explaining its relationship to her original item, and pose a philosophical or historical question to accompany it. “What do you suppose Judgment Horse has to say about Foul Bachelor Frog’s distaste for cleaning products? Is this representative of the introduction of horseback warfare in England during the Norman Invasion?” Done properly, this witty exchange will increase her sexual attraction to you ten fold, and you will have difficulty walking in the door after work without getting pounced on in the foyer.

Your girlfriend will want very much for you to meet her family. This is not necessarily because she is convinced of the long-term stamina of you relationship, but rather because she feels morally obligated to warn you about what you’re getting into. She will quickly and long-windedly explain to you the complications that arose from her mother’s two divorces and it will slowly dawn on you just exactly why she will never ever put up with your stupid man shit, ever ever. You will be frightened by the volume at which she communicates with her mother and siblings, and perhaps even taken aback by how flippantly they say things like, “You’re completely insane. Go away.” Don’t let this frighten you: there will be moments when you sense familial influence seeping into your arguments (of which there will be a fair few, more on that later), but you will also notice your girlfriend making a concerted effort to be more positive and communicative than she is with her mother or sisters. Consider such efforts an indication of how much she likes you.

Your girlfriend will fight with you. Sometimes nurture trumps nature, and you will soon discover that your girlfriend has a tendency to pick fights when she’s feeling cranky, tired, bested, overwhelmed, stressed, or just particularly saucy. You can try to predict when these fights will happen and what they’ll be about, but fights with your girlfriend are like electrons: the closer you get to predicting where they will happen, the farther you are from understanding their content, and vice versa. You may think you determined, based on the series of grumbles she made while waking up in the morning, that a small fight would break out sometime in the next four or five hours, but then she’ll completely floor you by fighting about how you don’t respect her love of Harry Potter enough, when you were totally convinced it was going to be about you leaving your shoes in the middle of the floor. The problem here will be determining which fights are simply her adversarial nature seeping out of her subconscious, and which are genuine concerns of hers. Pro Tip: Eye contact means she’s serious, pacing and fretting and whining and burying herself in the bed covers probably means there’s something else going on. Get to the bottom of this.

Your girlfriend will need a lot of convincing. This applies to a few things: convincing that you love her, convincing that she’s beautiful, convincing that you aren’t still hung up on your ex girlfriends, et cetera. She’s not trying to be manipulative or fishing for compliments – she genuinely doesn’t believe you. So, really, what this section should say is “Your girlfriend will at times have a soul-crushingly low self-esteem, and you need to know how to handle this.” Don’t be confused by the fact that she expresses almost too much confidence in her intelligence, speaking abilities, and taste in cartoons. Your girlfriend’s confidence will sometimes need cared for and nurtured, like a house plant or a bunny with a broken leg. But for Chrissake, don’t dote on her, or she’ll just take advantage of your kindness and probably won’t believe you anyway.

Your girlfriend will adore you. She really likes being in relationships, because they’re comfortable and exciting and means she doesn’t have to wear makeup as often. She will often come home from the store with a treat for you, perhaps a box of Spiderman fruit snacks or some Double Stuf Oreos. But this isn’t her way of expressing her adoration, she’s just being nice. Rather, she’ll just come right out with it. “I adore you,” she’ll often say. “I like having you around,” she’ll also proclaim. Believe her, please. She is not inclined to take such statements lightly, and if she’s already said it to you it wasn’t without careful consideration. She will want to go out and be seen in public with you, and she will claim that her dog likes you above all other house guests, even though her dog would literally spoon a Swiffer Sweeper if it was sitting on the couch long enough. She will be terrified of scaring you away, and not at all terrified of the idea of you watching her turn 30 (or 40, or 50). She will at times look at you very closely, and then cover her face with her hands as she realizes you’re much cuter than she is.

Your girlfriend will laugh uncontrollably at Spongebob Squarepants. If you make fun of her, she’ll knee you in the balls.

–Katie Sisneros