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I have finally come to terms with New Year's Eve. When I was younger, I hated it, because I expected everything to be magical and romantic and would often end up sitting at home alone in a party dress watching "Murder, She Wrote" and eating peanut butter, or arguing with a boyfriend, or racing around from party to party trying to find the best one.

Now I just pick a place, make sure my friends are there, and enjoy a regular night with the addition of counting backwards, which is always fun.

Since most people I know have had disappointing New Year's Eves, I've collected some of my favorite horror stories after the jump, as well as one actually romantic NYE story to cleanse the palate and give you hope. Happy New Year, everyone!

"I had a NYE party and sent a text inviting some people, including a guy I had briefly had a 'thing' with. He replies, 'I actually have a date with this girl Laura. She's really cool.'

"I was pretty bummed, as I orchestrated the party mainly to get him to my house, but I shrugged and soldiered on. Four months later he tells me she is pregnant with their kid, most likely due to their New Year's date. They're married now with a kid, so from my perspective that's a bad New Year's -- from theirs, I guess it's a good one?" -- Jenna, 24

"I was spending NYE with my boyfriend Javon and another couple, Janet and Marcus, at a lake house in Wisconsin. Janet was a horrible creature because she would constantly point out that I was 10 years younger than everyone else there, and she wore pajama pants and insisted they were real pants. The night only got more awkward when Janet went down into the basement of the lake house looking for Marcus and found him having anal sex with another woman over the side of a weight lifting bench. We were all stuck in the house together for another 48 hours." -- Marie, 23

"My boyfriend Tim's best friend decided to visit us in the big city for New Year's, and I was irritated because this best friend was always jealous that I got more of Tim's attention, and I had wanted a small, romantic NYE for once. He was also weirdly helpless and would get lost walking to the store next door.

"Lo and behold, on New Years Eve my boyfriend got really sick and I was stuck having NYE with the best friend, who wanted to watch 'House MD' and kept asking me to help him order takeout. Right before midnight I slipped out to the store under the pretense of buying soup for Tim, but really it was more to get away from the sad situation in my apartment. So I spent New Years in a drugstore, bummed and buying cans of soup from an even more bummed Walgreens employee." -- Kate, 26

"My boyfriend and I decided to go to New York City for New Year's Eve with some friends, and we had booked the flight in November. Well, of course, we broke up. We were both too poor and too proud to change plans, so we just moved our seats around on the plane and essentially split our friends up into two groups, since we refused to hang out together. I think our friends were trying to orchestrate a romantic reunion using the sneaky power of the New Year's kiss. They forced us to go to the same party, but we were too far gone by then and just hated each other. So when the countdown came, I strained my neck trying so hard to not look at him." -- Meg, 31

"New Year's Eve 2007 sucked because I had very high expectations. I was hoping this very specific boy would be there, and that we would dance and fall in love and all that stuff, but he didn't even show up to the party. I spent the night constantly looking out for him. I'd come to the party with two friends who wanted to party hop, but I wanted to stay put, so after a bit, they decided to leave without me. We got into an epic TEXT FIGHT, and I ended up crying in my pretty party dress because I was ditched on New Years." -- Jenn, 27

And now, here's a Lemondrop-style romantic story-- one that's sweet, but still rather tart.

"My birthday is January 1, so usually I go out with friends for New Year's Eve, and we roll the birthday celebration into it after the clock strikes midnight. This one year, a group of about 12 of us went out to dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Philly and then frantically rushed to find a bar for the countdown. We ended up at Dirty Frank's, which is a notorious dive bar. It's delightfully gross, dingy and full of cheap drinks. I had had a few when I decide to pick a drunken fight with my boyfriend, lamenting that he was never going to marry me, that we were going to be some sort of Susan Sarandon/Tim Robbins type of couple. (We had been together for seven years at the time.) Mike looks at me, sighs, and says, "Well, if you had just waited until tomorrow morning, I was going to ask you to marry me on your 'real' birthday." I replied with, "Are you asking me now?" He said, 'Yes, yes I am.'" -- Heather, 34

Awwww, how sweet was that? We want to hear all your NYE stories, the good ones, the bad ones, and the ones that make you cringe four years later. Tell us in the comments!