There’s a lot to ponder while transitioning into 2022.

But no whining about germs, forest fires destroying half of Colorado in December, and parts of Alaska being warmer than L.A. last week (feel free to panic but give me three minutes).

And please, no screaming about Betty White dying just short of 100 years old like it’s a national tragedy – just stop. She had a fantastically long and happy run and you just want attention by looking miserable.

No. Let me instead make my only New Year’s resolution and, in doing so, offer you a helpful piece of advice you had no idea you needed.

It’s a cautionary tale involving gymnasiums, which is always a hot topic this time of year because you can’t stop lying to yourself about looking better this NEW year (when you’re somehow still the same person).

Here’s my 2022 New year’s resolution: Don’t date someone with whom you go to the same gym.

I said “date.” Get married, get a family membership, carpool to the YMCA if you must. I did it myself at a couple gyms with a wife. Better yet, marry someone who works at an expensive gym where you get a free membership (but can accidentally see Neil Sedaka walking around the locker room in his underwear, which is a freakish 30 seconds I still can’t scrape from my memory. Other than that, the spouse-connected free gym thing gets my hearty endorsement.

But dating at the gym is nothing like marriage at the gym. It’s cuter, for one thing. There’s more giggling. And no real gym needs giggly cuteness.

Also, marriage is like the timeshare of family life. You’re basically stuck once you sign up and once it starts becoming a net loss, it takes a lot of painful craftiness and sacrifice to escape. By the time the mushroom clouds dissipate and the radiation dies down, sharing a gym membership while married is slightly less important than deciding who gets the chafing dish you got as a wedding present and never opened.

But I know a guy … I do … who just had this bizarre experience. Twenty hours after a relationship ended recently, not even a whole day, he rounds a corner by the gym’s water cooler the next morning and ends up face to face with her coming the other direction, like a weird TV show.

Uh … Hi.

It took me back to high school and the 139 times my girlfriend and I broke up (I talked to her last week, by the way, and I think we’re still breaking up). In high school, we had no choice when rounding that corner, and it sucked.

One day you’re a 16-year-old old boy, paying a florist extra to spray paint white roses blue because that’s your girlfriend’s favorite color. The next day you’re confused and dodging her like Frank Morris eluding searchlights while trying to get off Alcatraz.

That life-ending agony … again … and you had to keep going to the same school. You had to save face. You had to come back to school laughing for seven hours straight in case she was in the vicinity. I think I once saw my recent-ex-but-again-future-girlfriend in the hallway and, panicking, put my arm around a startled girl who had no idea who I was.

Come to think of it, that might have been a teacher.

I loved high school. Except for those breakup periods during which I felt like I was running from Federal marshals. So unexpectedly revisiting that feeling, even for a few seconds, was too weird for a guy my age.

It was a mistake compounded by the fact that she was the first girl with whom I actually worked out with – something I hate seeing couples do because of all the obvious mansplaining and general idiotic posing (I’m not above being an idiot, but I try to be a little less obvious).

We actually planned gym time together, including me getting up way earlier than my body and brain understood (“So we’re actually not up now because we’re just coming home from the party?”).

I liked working out with her. And this is not an indictment of the person I saw for a few months. It just didn’t work; she’s a great person with whom I may become friends again down the line.

But no matter how it goes down, or which side of the dumping one falls, it’ll just be weird for a while. And weird seems to somehow get more normal every day.

Follow music critic Tony Hicks at Twitter.com/TonyBaloney1967.