Single Girl Society – Don’t Ask For Advice You Don’t Intend On Taking

By Anjli

Lesson 41 – Don’t Ask For Advice You Don’t Intend On Taking

There you are, shaking your head again, because somehow (perhaps under the influence of a little Grey Goose and Sarah Dessen) you’ve wandered into dangerous territory yet again. So you fell in love with a fool. Who hasn’t? And it seems that every time you’re left to your own devices, you wake up covered in his sheets and your own shame. And even though you refer to him as a soul-sucking douchebag void of emotion, he’s always been your soul-sucking douchebag void of emotion. But just because he’s a fool doesn’t mean you have to be one too.

The way I see it is that if you’re going to go out of your way to beg your friends for advice on how to fall out of love with a man who clearly has no regard for your feelings, than you need to go out of your way to at least try and take their advice. So many times I’ve given my closest girlfriends pep talks that they’ve requested, to deter them from their loser ex-boyfriends, and so many times it’s like they haven’t listened at all as they race back to him and the bedding his mother probably purchased for him. If you have no intention of taking your friend’s advice, especially after you practically begged for it, then please do them a favor and stop asking for it.

By now we all know your friends are your friends and they just want what’s best for you. When they go out of their way to give you thoughtful advice, that you ignore the minute you smell so much as a hint of your ex’s cologne, the least you could do is make an effort to take it to heart. The blunt and honest truth is that nobody likes the friend that makes a huge deal of asking for advice about her romantic troubles but who, upon receiving said advice, pretends like she never asked for it in the first place.

Often girls justify going back to their exes with the fact that they’ve listened to advice suggesting they don’t, convincing themselves they’ve heard out both sides of the story. The problem lies in asking for advice out of ritual and never actually processing and internalizing it. And sure enough the vicious cycle begins, you run back to him and then to your friends for more advice that you don’t intend on actually taking as you rush back to him the minute you’re alone again.

Maybe some girls have a reservoir of advice to give out to girls like it’s candy on Halloween night, but when I take the time to dole out advice to my girlfriends, I put thought and consideration into it and, above all, energy. Energy that could’ve been spent doing things that are actually useful to my own life, like studying or playing Dance Dance Revolution. As a general rule of thumb, don’t ask for advice because you like the attention, or because you want to feel less guilty about not making any true efforts to move on from your ex. If you’re not going to consider your friends’ advice out of respect for yourself, then at least do it out of respect for your girlfriends.

Got it? Feel empowered? Good. Now get the first 40 rules of the Single Girl Society