It’s the start of a new school year and to honor that, we at CollegeCandy are bringing back a fan-favorite series, “We’ve All Been There.”  (We tried to get another national holiday/long weekend for you guys but it’s way harder than we thought so this will have to do.) Every week, Lauren – University of Michigan will comment on the common experiences all college women share – like the first day of classes or trying to figure out if that boy is crushin’ too. Read, relate, cringe and enjoy.

The boy you love just broke your heart, so your girlfriends decide that drinking is in order. Because nothing numbs the pain quite like a few shots of SoCo. Together with your roommates, you pick out a super hot outfit (consisting of some combination of low cut top/push up bra), take a few pre-gaming shots and head out the door to either “show him what he’s missing,” or “forget about that jerk.”

The night is perfect: you dance, you drink (a lot), and you even find a cute boy to flirt with in the corner.

Then, obvi, the relentless craving for breadsticks and marinara takes over and you and the girls head home for the Late Night Special from your favorite pizza place.

You make your way to your room to change before the food arrives and are suddenly reminded of just how depressed you are. Why doesn’t he love me? you ask yourself. What is wrong with me? Maybe if I just send him an email and tell him how I feel he will change his mind and want to be with me.

You sit down at your desk.

You turn on John Hiatt’s, “Have a Little Faith in Me,” or the “love songs” channel on Pandora.

You open your email, hoping deep down inside that he has already sent you one, that he realizes he made a big mistake, that he too is sitting at home crying to the soothing sounds of The Fray. That he still loves you.

He hasn’t.
Your heart sinks.

As the mascara stained tears streak your face and form a puddle on your desk, you start writing your own:

hi. i got drinks and i lovre you. i dont know why you hate meeeee. i lobve yoiu. i want to eat breadsticlks but im too sad czu i love you.

At this point the pizza has arrived and your roommates storm into your room, pizza box in hand, to find you weeping silently over your laptop as you type away. Snot is dripping from your nose and you wipe it with your bare arm just before it hits your upper lip. You don’t care. You just keep typing and crying and really connecting with the sad lyrics blaring out of your laptop speakers.

If you are lucky, your roommates get to you before you hit the send button. If you are not quite as lucky (or a really fast typer), it is only a matter of time until the email is opened and any shred of post break-up dignity is lost. But until then, there is pizza. And breadsticks. And unyielding drunken hope that he’s thinking the same things you just wrote, he was just too distraught to put them in an email yet.

A hope which inevitably dies the minute you wake up in the morning and realize what you’ve done.

Yeah, you’re not alone; we’ve all been there before. Many times.
Just be grateful at least you didn’t wake up with a full slice of pizza smashed between your keys and your screen.

I need more tissue.

Newsflash: No one likes to be dumped. It’s the ultimate feeling of being unwanted, unloved, and just not good enough.

Welcome to the last month of my life. After spending the last year hoping to do so, I finally reconnected with my high school sweetheart — someone I had tons of history with and who knows me better than anyone. After many, many ups and downs, it turns out that college life (even when it was the summer) was just not conducive to our relationship. I could sugar coat it saying that “we broke up,” but the truth is that I was dumped. Ouch.

At this point I should probably clarify that I’m not hating on this guy (or even angry), especially since his reasons for ending it were completely justified. That being said, losing the person you’re closest to is just not an easy thing to do. Not only are you losing what you had in the relationship, but oftentimes you could be losing a best friend as well.

So what do you do? As much as it might feel like your world is ending, spending more that 3 days in your pajamas on the couch watching P.S. I Love You calls for a heartbreak intervention. While the sting of being relationship sh*t-canned will stick around for a little while, it’s important to get back on your feet. I hope these tips will help.

Don’t play the blame game. While it’s really easy to start hating on the SOB who broke your heart, it’s important to remember that relationships often end. Unless your man cheated on you (in which case, I hope you dumped his ass), the breakup is quite possibly nobody’s “fault.” Chances are that you’ve both made some mistakes. Nobody is perfect, and for sure nobody is perfect in a relationship. As much as it sucks, sometimes things just don’t work out.

Reach out. You don’t have to do this by yourself. Your friends and family members have most likely experienced a break up or two, and they might have a few words of wisdom. (Or at least a bottle of Jack.) Sometimes, even having someone to sit and watch TV with you will help you feel less lonely and allow you to get all those feelings off your chest.

Remember that it’s okay to be sad. I know, it’s tempting to pull out the sour grapes and act like you don’t care – but it’s okay to be upset. In a way, it’s like grieving, and you just need to let the emotions run their course. Cry if you have to cry, scream if you have to scream, eat three Costco cakes if you have to eat three Costco cakes… Having your heart broken is a lot like riding a roller coaster, but it’ll be over eventually.

Cut off contact. I really hate this one, but it’s a necessary evil. Texting him “I’m so sorry” a million times isn’t going to make him want you back. Even if your guy pulled the “we can still be friends” card, being friends for the first little while could be a little too painful for you. What if he starts dating someone else? Give each other a little space for a couple weeks and if you both agree, slowly start making contact again. Just remember: being friends doesn’t mean you’re going to start dating again, so if those are your intentions don’t do it. But if you value this person enough to just be friends, give it a shot.

Don’t Bad Mouth. Sure, the douche-bag forgot your birthday (twice) and you’re glad to have him out of your life, but try to be mature. This is especially important if you have mutual friends. Once you start bad mouthing each other, they will feel like they’ve been put in the middle, and nobody wants that. Even though you’re resentful, there was a point in time that you loved this guy. You wouldn’t want him telling his friends all the embarrassing things that are wrong with you – do him the same courtesy.

No Regrets. Sometimes after a relationship ends, it’s easy to look at the time spent together as a waste. Try to remember all the positive things you will take with you long after this guy is out of your life. Memories are good things to hold on to, so try not to regret them. If nothing else, hopefully this experience has taught you what you really want out of a relationship.

Remember it will be okay. I’m not gonna lie, the first few days suck. A lot. It feels like your life is over, and you just don’t know what to do with yourself. They call it being heartbroken for a reason. It’s not a fun thing to experience, but have a shower, get out of your PJs, and eventually things will get better. You may feel like your ex was perfect for you, but just remember that the real perfect guy would want to be with you too.

How do you get over a breakup?

[It doesn’t matter what school you go to, what state it is in, how big it is, whether it is public or private, all girls or coed…there are experiences that all college students share. No matter how crazy you think your personal situation is, it is not just you.

So, let’s bring it all out in the open. Right here. Because you are not alone - we’ve all been there before.]

The Drunk Email:

The boy you love just broke your heart, so your girlfriends decide that drinking is in order. Because nothing numbs the pain quite like a few shots of SoCo. Together with your roommates, you pick out a super hot outfit (consisting of some combination of low cut top/push up bra), take a few pre-gaming shots and head out the door to either “show him what he’s missing,” or “forget about that prick.”

The night is perfect: you dance, you drink (a lot), and you even find a cute boy to flirt with in the corner.

Then, obvi, the relentless craving for breadsticks and marinara takes over and you and the girls head home for the Late Night Special from your favorite pizza place.

You make your way to your room to change before the food arrives and are suddenly reminded of just how depressed you are. Why doesn’t he love me? you ask yourself. What is wrong with me? Maybe if I just send him an email and tell him how I feel he will change his mind and want to be with me.

You sit down at your desk.

You turn on John Hiatt’s, “Have a Little Faith in Me,” or one of the emo O.C. Soundtracks.

You open your email, hoping deep down inside that he has already sent you one. He hasn’t. You begin to write your own:

i dont know why you hate meeeee. i lobve yoiu. i want to eat breadsticlks but im too sad czu i love you.

At this point the pizza has arrived and your roommates storm into your room, pizza box in hand, to find you weeping silently over your laptop as you type away. Snot is dripping from your nose and you wipe it with your bare arm. You keep typing and crying and really connecting with the sad lyrics blaring out of your iPod speakers.

If you are lucky, your roommates get to you before you hit the send button. If you are not lucky, it is only a few hours until the email is opened and your dignity is lost. And pizza sauce gets all over your keyboard. And more SoCo shots are in order.

We’ve all been there, honey. Thank God Google is working to prevent this in the future.

Come back next week for more moments of misery that we can all share. Like all those times you promised and swore to God that you would never. drink. again.

Once upon a time, I dated one guy for a long time. But instead of living happily ever after with me, he woke up one day and decided he wanted to “go through an asshole phase” (his words, not mine). After dumping me and proceeding to flirt and hook up with a lot of mutual friends, my once-love promptly forgot all about his sappy promises of “forever” and pretended we had never met.

You could say I was heartbroken.

Because I had always been “a good girl,” I hadn’t really dated around before the Ex, and was pretty flabbergasted at the entire dating process. Plus, I was grieving like some kind of Victorian widow in black and wasn’t thinking straight. Additionally, I was going out and drinking a little more — even though I was completely conscious of the fact that drinking a little more was going to make me cry a little more come hangover time. All of those factors combined meant that I decided my only life choice was to do what all my friends were doing: hooking up with random dudes because I could.

It took me a while to get a lay of the land (haha. Get it?), but after a few stumbles into emotional territory — haven’t you heard? Emotions don’t belong in hook-ups — I totally got the hang of it: meet a guy, make it obvious you’re easy going, be physical early, and then convince him to sleep with you after 1 or 2 dates. Guys are very easily convinced, and playing up my free-spiritedness made it easy for me to seem totally okay with everything. Even though, in the back of my wound-up mind, whenever the guy was snoring too loudly or fumbling around like an idiot, I would fear that I was not made for random hook-ups, I kept at it.

Because everyone was doing it. I’d hear stories and see things on TV and decide time and time again that the whole world was hooking up. This is what new feminism was; taking back your sexual power, doing it because you could, making sure guys didn’t have all the fun.

It’s not like I went crazy, but after a few years I had to use two hands to count the amount of people I had slept with, and for awhile, that was a sense of pride. I had successfully thrown off my clammy good-girlness and had become a woman! …or something.

But always this sense, this weird, little mosquito of a thought, would be buzzing around my brain. I refused to listen to it because I already knew what it was saying and I really didn’t want to hear. This is not what you want…it buzzed whenever I turned over and realized the person next to me was not very attractive, or even cool. This is annoying and not fun and you don’t need this in your life…it buzzed when a guy would become too attached and I knew I was probably going to hurt him. Honestly, whoever this is, it’s not you.

It took me three years to take the earplugs out. Three years to admit the truth. Of course that wasn’t me. Sex is great and I dig it a lot but I’m an independent person – I don’t need the extra awkwardness of a guy I don’t know or even like attached to my hip. I never needed it. What I was looking for was someone to love, and each month, 6 months, year that it didn’t happen…I decided that something had to fill that void. Even if they filled it with bad jokes and boring conversation.

So even though I knew it all along, I decided to admit it to myself last night: I regret almost every guy I hooked up with. I learned things about myself for sure, I learned a good amount about human behavior, but I don’t think I needed an STD scare and a bunch of awkward goodbyes to learn those things, either.

Because no matter how much I cringe, these events are still part of my life, and I’ve allowed myself to become a better, more confident person through them – which is why I’m not crusading against random hook-ups. They can be positive experiences. They can be fun. But letting society or guilt or revenge push you to have them? Take my advice: it’ll never work the way you want it to work, and it’ll never feel the way you want it to feel.

There’s nothing wrong with having fun and loving your sexual side. Love it all day long. But always listen to that little buzzing in your brain. It’s just trying to make sure you treat yourself the way you deserve to be treated.

But I’m young. And the fact that I’m eating cereal right out of the box because I can’t afford milk is just one of those side effects of trying to find yourself…right?

At least that’s what I thought. Until I went back to school this weekend (for the first of many weddings) and realized that everyone had gone and grown up while I was searching for pennies to pay for my coffee in New York.

It isn’t that I’m stuck back in my college days. In fact, I did quite the opposite after graduating. I moved further away (literally and figuratively) than anyone from home. But when I went back I realized that while I was still trying to find myself they had already done just that. With steady jobs, big rocks on their fingers, wedding planning and bed times.

My already confused and heartbroken self had just encountered one thing I had never planned on: my friends, all 23 and 24, were acting old.

Now I’m not saying that they were stiffs, we all drank and danced and had a really good time at the wedding. Sh*t, they even played Chubby Bunny by the bonfire (yes, there was a bonfire). But at the end of the night, when we got back to our hotel room, everyone was tired and wanted to go to bed…. at midnight.

And I was stuck on the floor with half a beer and some pistachios wondering what had happened to the girls that used to stay up half the night goofing off and talking and laughing until we cried or peed our pants or both.

Maybe it was the fact that I felt such a chasm between us. Me, up in New York a predictable mess and trying to find out what I want for myself. And them, down South, having everything figured out.

But it isn’t so much the geography that separates us but the ideals of what we want. I suppose I don’t want to have everything figured out right now because years later I want to know that I struggled and I searched and I understood where I was going before I got there.

I am happy for them that they have it all together and I am happy for me that I am just now starting to fall apart.

I know that this life, this unpredictable, messy, emotional life I am trying to sort out is the one I am supposed to be living. So maybe I am not grown up yet. But I’m looking forward to the years it takes me to become the grown up I am meant to be.