Here at CollegeCandy, we consider ourselves mature, talented women with a wealth of knowledge and expertise on a wide range of subjects. (What? If we don’t love ourselves, who will?) We’ve grown and learned from our past, so let me ask you a question:

WHY ARE YOU STILL GIVING AND GETTING HICKEYS?

Seriously, this is some high school stuff that I’m talking about. This goes in this list with movie theater make out sessions, the I-have-no-idea-what-I’m-doing-OMG-am-I-hurting-you? hand job and stealing liquor from your parents’ stash. We’ve all moved on to higher education so let’s leave these blemishes (literally) behind.

Besides the cosmetic issue of having a giant purple splotch on your neck that requires industrial strength concealer to conceal, hickeys kinda hurt. And they’re a ton of work to accomplish (necks don’t vigorously suck themselves, people). And apparently they’re really dangerous. And not in the “OMG, my parents are SO gonna see that” kinda way; I’m talking in the ‘THEY CAN PARALYZE YOU‘ fashion. Maybe it’s the whole vampire trend/art imitating real life, or maybe it’s people marking their territory, but either way I don’t care. I’d rather not have someone potentially paralyze me from bruising my arteries.

Is it worth it? For a giant hookup souvenir that requires you to wear a turtleneck/creatively wrapped pashmina for a week?

Uh, no.

For those of you who are fans out there, reconsider if the pleasure is worth the pain of a potential bruised vessel or blood clot. (Things just got heavy.) And if that doesn’t scare you straight, consider what it would be like to explain your hospitalization to the parental units.

“Hi Mom. No, I’m not calling to ask for more money. I’m in the emergency room. Uh. Yeah, so…no. No, it wasn’t a car accident. No, I didn’t fall out of my loft. It’s like, so, uh, things were getting heated with this boy and….”

Yeah, I thought so.
Let’s stop with the hickeys and practice safe sex, shall we?

[Everyone’s got a morning after story and we wanna hear yours! Send it over to us and we’ll post it – anonymously, of course – right here!]

Hickeys.
WTF good does a hickey ever do?
WTF bad does a hickey ever do? Now that’s a question I can answer. Unfortunately my answer involves parents, family friends and some big league embarrassment.

It was freshman year and I’d just started hooking up with my next-door-neighbor (hell yeah, co-ed floors!). It was one of those “big secret” type things and only my BFFs on my floor knew what the dealio was. But not for long… After a rough night of… watching TV (cough cough), I hopped a train to Philly to see a friend. Of course, it was my ex-boyfriend’s best friend who I was visiting and who had the pleasure of being the first person to tell me about the giant vampire bite I had on my neck. (A “looks like you’re enjoying college” comment included.)

I could only imagine what he’d be relaying back to the ex about my new moral compass, but that wasn’t even my biggest concern. That trophy would probably have to go to seeing my parents, neighbors, family friends, etc., the next morning at a giant football tailgate. Another train ride later, I’m sitting in my best friend’s dorm room and we’re brainstorming ways of how to avoid this whole mess. Makeup. Northface. Hair down. “Why not try all three?” I figured. Wrong answer.

Come next morning, I’m standing amongst literally my entire hometown (miraculously, my entire high school went to the same two colleges who happened to be playing the homecoming game against each other). Neighbors, families I babysit for, and my priest (okay that’s a lie, but it certainly felt like it) were lounging around, chowing down on some juicy burgers. Next thing I know, the ex boyfriend (who of course heard about the tailgate) wanders over chuckling to himself. Obviously having already received word from his friend about my little mishap, he grabs a burger and front row seats to my life falling apart.

Naturally, I ignore him and start chatting with friends, eating some beef and sipping some beers. It starts getting warm so I take off my North Face. No harm, right? I’ve still got the makeup and my hair covering the hickey. Wrong. Like every other time I’ve held my head in shame, taking off any clothes was a bad idea. Low and behold, all that makeup we’d so expertly applied had rubbed off on my sweatshirt.

And who is the first to notice?
My mother.

“Hmmm… what’s that on your neck?” she asked me, the comment dripping with sarcasm. She already knew (they always do) and couldn’t wait to see what I had to say about it.

“What? Oh, my cross-body computer bag must’ve rubbed my neck on the way to do my lab yesterday,” I reply, thinking I’m fairly witty for coming up with that on my feet and making myself look studious. I should’ve seen the fault: my mom knows I’d never buy a cross-body bag (they always make your boobs look funny, right?!). “Its Maggie’s bag actually,” I add quickly, throwing my new college friend under the bus. She’ll never know; she’s not even there to argue.

“What’s your computer bag’s name?” my next-door-neighbor’s dad asked. Everyone turns to stare. So funny, my neighbors are. Sooo funny. I glared at him in return, while the entire tailgate crew continues to comment on my love bite. I tried to change the subject, brush it all off, drink away the embarrassment. And then the ex saunters over, a look of pure bliss on his face.

“You should’ve seen the look on your dad’s face.”

The remainder of my day was spent dodging comments from the adults and questions from my friends. While they all basked in the glory of my embarrassment (fueled by the fact that I always get made fun of for being an uptight tease), I wallowed in my own self pity and just had to try to laugh it off; which, by the way, is a lot harder than it sounds when I’m maintaining the lie to my mother (“yeah, my text books are really heavy!”) and avoiding reality…

So, here are a few tips for handling the most difficult of situations.

“I think I had an accident…” – Now I hope this hasn’t happened to you, but if you ever happen to wake up and realize that you took one too few bathroom trips last night, I have a solution for you. My friend Chris once peed himself (for lack of a better phrase) and promptly asked the girl he woke up with for a glass of water. As soon as she handed it to him, he spilled it all over his lap. Hey, I’d much rather be compared to a klutz than an accident-prone toddler.

“What’s your name again?” – Waking up next to a rando is pretty embarrassing. But nothing is worse than waking up to a relative stranger when you can’t remember their name. Even if you’ve narrowed it down to Jose and Jackson, you really can’t just test one out to see if it’s right. If you’re planning on never seeing them again, it’s totally acceptable to use the word “you” in the place of their name in any sentence. If you plan on seeing them again, however, ask them to enter their number (and name!) into your phone. Don’t pull the ol’ “How do you spell your name?” when you enter it in. Believe me, it’s pretty mortifying when he snaps back “B-E-N” while staring you down.

“So uh…did we…? Yeah….” – Piecing together your activities from the night before is often an incremental process. You can wake up naked, next to your floor mate, with your clothes strewn about, but you won’t really believe anything happened until you see the universal tell-tale sign. Yes, I’m talking about the icky left-over condom on the ground. At this point, you have two options: a) Shake the guy until he wakes up, ask him what happened, and face the music or b) book it out of there and live in not-so-blissful ignorance. The choice is yours.

“Ew, what is that?” – Often we wake up with things on our bodies that we sure as hell didn’t have before we went to bed. Hickeys, inappropriate phrases written in permanent marker, and mysterious bruises are all common when waking up from an evening of debauchery. Once I even woke up with chewed bubble gum all over my body. (No, I was not chewing gum before I went to bed). The only tidbit of wisdom I have for you is to use nail polish remover. I swear that stuff will remove anything.

“Someone had a fun night last night.” – There’s nothing worse than walk-of-shaming. Except, of course, when you run into somebody you know on your journey home. Once I was walking home in a giant sweatshirt and oversized flip-flops with my heels in either hand. Little did I know that my friend Brian would snap a picture of me in all my humiliation on his camera phone. Oh don’t worry, the picture made it on to the front of my birthday card that year. Heed my advice and do not walk opposite the flow of traffic at prime class time.

[Photo courtesy of Spring_Peeper on Flickr.]

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.]

Oh what a night.

From the pre-party to the bar to waking up next to that that kid from your Psych lecture, it was a good one. A great one. A night that is meant to be shared. A night that is meant to be remembered. A night that requires your roommates’ pictures to help in the remembering.

But, man do you feel like hell this morning. You wake up, throw on some sweats (and throw the boy out), and head down to the kitchen for a much-needed bottle of Gatorade. It’s early – you never can sleep in after a long night of drinking – so you tip toe through the house.

When you stumble down the steps, though, you hear some commotion in the kitchen. You round the stairs and smack into 5 of your roommates, coffee and toast in hand, waiting for you on the couch. Apparently they can’t sleep in either.

One of the girls hands you a mug of coffee. Oh sweet bliss.

Everyone is still wearing their makeup from the night before, which only complements the giant black circles under their eyes. As you sit down and start sipping on your coffee, your 6th roommate walks into the house, still wearing her tube top and trouser jeans from the night before. Her heels are in her hand. Her neck is covered in hickeys.

You notice a pile of cameras on the table. Next to them, empty shot glasses and dried up lime wedges. The thought of tequila shots sends shivers down your spine as you flash back to the night before.

“So….” One of your roommate’s looks to you for your story. And so it begins.

You regale your roommates with tales of your late night adventures: how you started talking to the boy, the line you used to get him to come home with you (“I got some new sheets…”), and how good (or bad) his skills were in the bedroom. You give them every little detail – the kind of stuff you can only share with these girls – in between much needed gulps of coffee.

Then it’s your roommate’s turn to share her stories. And then the next.

You all pass the cameras around, filling in the gaps and holes of the evening. You laugh at the 1,276 selfies you took, the videos that you thought were pictures and the gross guys that tried hitting on everyone at the bar. You compare late-night eating horror stories (“So that’s where all my cream cheese went??”), and make fun of the late-comer who is still wearing her bar outfit.

“I mean, really, who the hell still gives hickeys?!”

Before you know it, it is 3pm, you are all still sitting around in your PJs, and you know way more about some random dude’s kissing abilities than you ever thought you should. You order in some Jimmy Johns or pizza or greasy Chinese and spend the rest of the day chilling on the couch until it’s time to get up, get ready and do it all again.

Yeah, we’ve all been there. The morning-after recap is the best.

In my last blog, I wrote about the splendors of holiday hookups. (If you haven’t read it yet, get on it!) Now that most of us have exhausted the extent of our winter break hook-ups, I thought I’d take a second look at this most treasured of holiday traditions. As it turns out, there are a few things that actually can go wrong…

The Parent Thing: Even though we’ve moved out, most of us hate the thought of our parents knowing anything about our sex lives. This proves to be a huge problem when you’re actually hooking up under their roof. Nothing makes you feel like you’re back in high school more than tip-toeing through your house with a guy in tow. If you stay at his house, on the other hand, you run the risk of being discovered by his Mom and becoming “that slut” that’s sleeping with her baby.

The Small Town Thing: No matter how big of a city you live in, you can’t deny that we live in a very, very small world. And nothing proves that more true than a hometown hookup rumor spreading like a wildfire. I swear, once one person finds out and spills the beans, it’s all over. You can bet by the end of the week anybody and everybody, from his Mom to your 8th grade woodshop teacher, will know of your little rendezvous(s). Or, if you’re like me and accidentally leave a hickey on his neck, you don’t even need anybody to say anything for the entire world to know. My bad.

The High School History Thing: This is slightly related to the Small Town Thing. If you and your hookup of choice are from the same town or high school, it is very likely that they have been involved with other people that you know. Just be sure that if you’re hooking up with someone, that you’re not gonna piss off your or your partner’s ex-lovers, best friends, or relatives. I learned this puppy the hard way, and believe me, it really sucks.

The DTR Thing: By DTR, I mean the loved and loathed “Define The Relationship” conversation. Once you start hooking up, you and your guy are going to have to discuss where you want your relationship is and where you want it to go. This holds especially true if you’re hooking up with someone you’ve already been involved with. Do you want to get back together or stay friends with benefits? Hookups during school breaks put an expiration date on any affairs, often speeding up the onset of the DTR and the difficult questions that ensue.

Did anybody else run into obstacles with their holiday hook-ups? Or am I just severely crippled in the suave department?

Upon arriving at home to a comfy bed, clean shower, and lots of home cookin’, we immediately headed out to the bar to enjoy the Biggest Bar Night of the Year. We are using the term “enjoy” loosely, of course, because the evening was really just a night of awkward conversation and not enough alcohol. (Funny, that sounds a lot like Thanksgiving dinner when our bf met our parents.)

We loaded up on the carbs at Thanksgiving dinner to prepare for today’s Black Friday shopping spree, and besides a few broken nails and a black eye (on that bitch who tried to grab the last Flip Cam),  things turned out OK.  We came home with the perfect gift for our roommates, got some hot new jeans, and a really cute scarf to cover the hickey our BF left on the most obvious part of our neck.

Now it’s time to enjoy the rest of the weekend…and all the Thanksgiving leftovers.

Hickeys are freakin’ weird. Seriously, think about it. A guy sucks on your neck until you have a bruise the size of a silver dollar, and somehow it’s “sexy” and “romantic”?

Under any other circumstances, a guy giving you a bruise is reason to press charges. What makes hickeys the exception? And why must he insist on giving them?

Granted, I’m not just blaming the guy – nine times out of ten, hickeys are complete accidents. Most people understand that nothing screams “I’M A SKANK!!” more than a giant red disfigurement on your neck. But what about the ones that are just a little toooo obvious? Two days ago, my friend Megan came home so hickey-ed that she may have very well been mauled by a small dog. What compelled Mr. Let’s Make Out Behind the Stadium to burden her with such a mark?

Reason #1: Branding. Not gonna lie, I’ve been the culprit of the tricky hickey. In high school I was hooking up with this guy on the basketball team that insisted on keeping it a secret. When he pulled off his warm ups at the biggest game of the season that year, it was definitely not a secret anymore. This may be a reason why guys give hickeys – they’re marking their territory. Hey, at least he’s not peeing on you.

Reason #2: Flashbacks. Most of us like to think we’re past the innocence of “necking” a la 1950’s high school prom. To some, hickeys are still a playful little blast from the past. I don’t know about you, but a guy’s desire to relive the glory days really doesn’t justify the pain of wearing weather-inappropriate clothing for a week.

Reason #3: Because they can. Jerks.

Reason #4: Pure Enjoyment. The object of your affection may enjoy the feeling of receiving a hickey, which can transform into two separate motives. Firstly, he may just think you enjoy them as much as he does, and wants you to experience that enjoyment. On the other hand, he may just be giving you a hint that he wants it to be his turn. Avoid the whole situation altogether – give the eager beaver a 7 day sex-mark and see how much he enjoys it.

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Oprah’s retiring…but then what?

Fans killed at football game…come on guys!

Keith Olbermann doesn’t vote..hm

Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams are done-zo….again