Last week, my male friend over at COED Magazine shared his thoughts on how we ladies handle life after a break up. And let me just say, I haven’t LOLed that hard since the first time I watched this. (OMG. Just watched it again. HILARIOUS.)

It’s just so amusing to think about how little guys know about us (Note: I’m sure it was just as ROTFL-worthy for Paul when he read my thoughts on guys after a break-up); how they think we just bounce right back, better than ever, immediately following “the talk.” I mean, that’s not a bad thing. Their assumptions are way less disturbing (and pathetic) than the reality for most of us.

A reality which I’m about to lay out, in all it’s honest glory.

So let’s break down some walls and let it all hang out:

He Says: They’ll do better without us.
Reality: Yes, we probably will. Once we don’t have to waste our time getting in text fights or taking care of your drunk ass, our lives will finally have some meaning again. We’ll return to the gym. We’ll look hotter than ever. We’ll get our swagger back and hit the town….hard.

….Eventually.

First, of course, we’ll focus on all the happy happy fun times we won’t have anymore. The amazing kisses. The snuggle sessions. The cute way you furrowed your eyebrows when you were working on an Econ problem. How cute you looked in those Nike classics. How romantic you were….that one time when we first started dating, even though you haven’t done jack-sh*t since then. We’ll rely on our friends to remind us hourly (and every 4 minutes when we’re drunk) how awful and selfish and annoying you were.

He Says: We’ll Sleep with THAT guy.
Reality:  Yeah, there’s a chance that in a fit of deep depression we’ll finally give in to the sexual tension and get with someone who’s been around for awhile. More likely though, after our friends throw us in the shower, stab us in the eye applying some eyeliner, squeeze us into a pair of skinny jeans (that got a lot tighter thanks to the post-break up chocolate binges) and force us to go out to the bar (“SINGLE GIRLS, WHAT?!”), we’ll get really drunk and make out with a boy in the corner just to prove that we’ve still got it.

And while it  might be fun and exciting in the moment, we’ll cry about it – a lot – the next day.

He Says: They’ll go “Girls Gone Wild”.
Reality: Yeah, if Girls Gone Wild now means Girls Gone on a Downward Spiral in Sweatpants and No Makeup With a Package of Cookie Dough in Their Bed While Crying Through a Re-Run of Gossip Girl.

He Says: They’ll tell other girls about us.
Reality: You better freaking believe we will. No girl likes to admit to the shame of being a dumpee or the judgment of being the a-hole dumper. So we’re obviously going to have to explain to anyone who asks (or anyone who happens to cross our paths in the weeks following the break-up, be it a friend of a friend or our Psych professor) how lazy you were, how often you couldn’t get it up, how quick you were when you could get it up, how your room smelled like rotting bacon, how often you couldn’t get it up, how you got all Ronnie aggressive when you were drinking and, of course, how often you couldn’t get it up.

He Says: They’ll miss having sex with us.
Reality: For some, maybe. For others, it’s more about the companionship than the sex. The snuggles. The Sunday night TV marathons. The security in knowing we’ll always have someone to grab dinner with, see a movie with, stumble home from a party with. That’s what we’ll miss the most.

If we really want sex, we can just call up “that guy,” right?

The reality is, 99.9% of girls, even if they’re the ones doing the dumping, hit a low in the weeks or months immediately following a break up. They question themselves (“What’s wrong with me?!”), they question love (“Am I ever going to find someone else?”), they question you (“Why did I ever let him buy me that Jager Bomb and take my number?”). But then one day, they wake up out of that greasy/pity food coma and they don’t feel the need to check their phone to see if the ex texted. And the next day, they don’t even think about creepin’ the ex’s Facebook page. And a week after that, they don’t spend 15 extra minutes making themselves look extra hot to make the ex hate himself….just in case they happen to run into him.

Eventually, be it weeks or months down the road, they wake up one day feeling great and realize that they CAN do better than that douche lord…. and they will.

And when that happens, well, eat your heart out, boys. That girl is officially single and ready to get. her. freak on.

Find out what HE THINKS at COEDMagazine.com

Lesson 24: Nicholas Sparks Is Not The Author Of Your Life

If you have yet to endure the torture that is a Nicholas Sparks movie marathon, I highly suggest you look into it purely as a service to yourself. Though the sappy movies seem out of place in single girl world, they’re actually a pretty effective learning tool – of what not to do.

Nicholas Sparks, author of our favorite tear jerking, secret guilty pleasure movies, shared the formula to his book-to-movie love stories. “(Romances) are all essentially the same story: You’ve got a woman, she’s down on her luck, she meets the handsome stranger who falls desperately in love with her, but he’s got these quirks, she must change him, and they have their conflicts, and then they end up happily ever after,” Sparks said.

While the roller coaster dramas from the likes of The Notebook and Dear John work beautifully on your television screen, they don’t transfer so well into reality. Even as Sparks’ novels point out some valid points about love, like that it can happen unexpectedly or that it can change a person or it’s tendency for turbulence, it’s imperative that single girls not set a “Nicholas Sparks Standard” for their love lives.

First things first, you don’t have to be down on your luck to fall in love. Plenty of women find love when they achieve all of the goals they set for themselves, when their lives are vibrant and full without the existence of a go-to plus one. And as much as I hate to sound like your mother, people tend to be attracted to other happy people. A damsel in distress does not always a love story make. So live your life, fall in love or don’t, but don’t think that love only comes along when you need to be lifted out of a rut.

Secondly, our modern dating scene does not cater well to the idea of falling “desperately in love.” Falling in love? Yes. Desperately? Not so much. I mean, what girl these days wants to be viewed as desperate? And if single girls spend so much energy trying not to appear desperate, what makes us think that single guys would want to be portrayed that way? What with school, social lives, family, mid-college crises, nobody our age has the time to fall “desperately in love.” Though there are always exceptions, nowadays carving your initials into a tree makes way for more efficient proclamations of his love, like a quickie text in between classes.

Lastly, changing a person rarely ensures a “happily ever after.” If there’s anything The Hills has taught me, it’s that you can’t change a person. (Sure, the trials and tribulations of Lauren Conrad are not the most credible source for wisdom, but good advice nonetheless.) Love is not a permission slip to change a man. Love can change people but people can’t change people.

There will always be those girls who believe their lives will someday be a Nicholas Sparks novel and they believe it to the core because they need to. Without the “Nicholas Sparks Standard” those girls wouldn’t survive because they’re too afraid to figure out a love story mold of their own. Truly great love stories exist but that doesn’t mean they have to follow the formula of the ones that have already been written.

Got it? Feel empowered? Good. Now get the first 23 rules of the Single Girl Society right here.

Lesson 23: Summer and Single Go Hand in Hand

There’s nothing like finals time to stress you out enough to make you forget that your last few dates were total flops. Caught up in the chaos of studying for a cumulative exam created by the most cruel of professors, there is a sigh of relief in knowing that your single life is the last thing on your mind, if only for a week. But what’s a girl to do with a suddenly cleared up summer schedule and no summer romance lined up?

First things first, do what makes you happy. This isn’t the summer before your senior year in high school when all you and your girlfriends did all summer was hang out at the skate park watching the same lame guys from school hook ollies and talk about the NBA playoffs. In college, so much of our school year is spent doing things for others – sororities, your loser ex-boyfriend, professors who refuse to acknowledge that their class isn’t the only one you’re taking – but the summer is the one time that is truly ours to do whatever we want. The best thing you can do for the three months of sweet respite before fall and it’s accompanying stresses barge back into your life is take this time for yourself and make it your own.

In true Single Girl Society fashion, to make your summer truly your own, you’ve got to give up the notion of securing a summer romance the way pretty much every Freddie Prinze Jr. movie taught us to do. The whole whimsy and appeal behind a summer romance is that it’s slightly unexpected and how exactly do you plan to achieve that if you’re using your potential suitors’ Facebook statuses to decide who’ll be where this summer? Summer romances are great, but planning them (when you probably should be using that time for yourself instead) doesn’t make them a reality. So why waste all that time on somebody you could potentially love when you could be spending it on a life you really love?

If you’re leaving town this summer, make the most of it. Throw yourself in a completely new environment and soak it up! If you’re planning on picking up a summer job, pick something you don’t normally go for. Always been the girl with a retail job?  Try waitressing instead this summer. Yeah, you could hate it, but then again you could meet some really great new friends and end up loving it. In order to give yourself a chance this summer, don’t be afraid to branch out past your comfort zone. The best part? Even if you’re going back to your hometown for the summer, you don’t have to stray too far to get out of your comfort zone; simply pick up a job or volunteer work someplace new to you.

If you’ve got the means to travel this summer, whether it’s around your hometown or across the world, take advantage of your free time with friends and a little help from sites like Groupon and Living Social, or ride solo and fully submerge yourself in someplace new. By switching things up this summer, you’re opening the doors, not just to new friends or a summer romance, but to the parts of yourself you haven’t discovered yet.

Being single can get pretty boring if you don’t allow yourself to experience a change every once in a while. In college, summer is the perfect time to shake things up. Summer is the perfect time to remind yourself that being single is not a rut between boyfriends, it’s a chance for your to realize that being single means total freedom to try to become someone new, whether you’re just changing your go-to pedicure color or your entire outlook on life.

Got it? Feel empowered? Good. Now get the first 22 rules of the Single Girl Society right here.

Lesson 21: Forget Happily Ever After

Disney princesses from Cinderella to Sleeping Beauty, even Nala of The Lion King, have taught us from our childhood to look forward to some sort of “happily ever after.” Since our days of insisting on wearing our Disney princess Halloween costumes at completely inappropriate times (like your uncle’s wedding) we’ve desperately clung onto the notion that “happily ever after” would someday be all ours. As teenagers we claimed not to care about Prince Charming while we secretly screened each boyfriend, wondering if he was going to be the last man standing in our own charmed versions of a Disney romance. Now in college, we’re in the process of making our dreams come true and yet somehow Prince Charming keeps slipping through our fingers in a not-so-Disney fashion.

Believe me girl, I’ve been there.

Look, “happily ever after” is great and all, but how can you place so much happiness on something you haven’t even had yet? Every time you fuel the fire on achieving your own happy ending, you take away from the happiness you already have.

Unsure of what I mean? Let’s try relating this to something we can all understand – purses.  Imagine that ever since you were a little girl all you’ve wanted was a vintage black quilted, chain strap Chanel bag and you always promised yourself that someday you would get one. But until you’ve starved yourself enough to afford the Chanel bag, you’ve been using a worn-in buttery leather Coach purse. While you’re so fixated on that Chanel bag, you fail to realize just how great your trusty Coach bag is. Just like with a happy ending, if you put too much significance on an end that hasn’t even happened yet, how can you expect anything before the end to be meaningful too?

It’s time that single girls everywhere forget the “happily ever after” they’ve been trained to aim for and just enjoy the ride. The pain, the heartbreak, the awkward moments – it’s all just a part of the learning process. However, you shouldn’t be focusing on the dating learning process but instead on the process that allows you to learn about yourself, because once “happily ever after” rolls around, who knows what’ll happen? If it’s what I’ve been told, your happy ending is a time to know what you want, with little room left to figure things out.

Take advantage of the fact that this time before the “happily ever after” is your grace period. Make the mistakes you avoided and do it for the sake of knowing that it’s not the end of the world if things don’t work out. Believe in a happy ending for yourself, but don’t make your life all about achieving it. The more willing you are to enjoy the ride that is the dating world, the less you’re going to rely on the sturdy rock of a “happily ever after” and realize that you can have a “happily ever present.”

Look, I know how cheesy that sounds but when you really think about it, nobody really ever knows what happened to those Disney princesses after their happy endings. What if Cinderella got divorced when she realized she barely knew the prince? Or what if Sleeping Beauty’s Ambien high wore off and she realized she settled too quickly after her waking from her slumber? The time leading up to the happy ending always seems to be the real story worth telling, so forget “happily ever after” and just be happy where you are.

Got it? Now get the first 20 rules of the Single Girl Society right here.

Lesson 20: Take a personal time-out.

So, you’re single, huh? Maybe it’s time to reevaluate whether or not you’ve really taken advantage or it. I know what you’re thinking, “What could I possibly have to take advantage of besides the sale on single serving frozen vegetables?” And while I fully support fulfilling your five servings a day, I think it’s time to branch out. Alone.

This past Saturday morning, it was a particularly gorgeous sunny day in my city and I knew I wanted to spend it outside. I called the guy I’ve been seeing recently and asked him if he wanted to tag along but his hangover had the best of him (over the toilet) so I wished him luck and decided to hit a local greenbelt solo. With my iPod, a Nalgene water bottle and time on my hands I wandered down the trails and couldn’t help but feel like I never wanted it to end.

As incredibly cheese-tastic as it sounds, Mumford and Sons serenaded me as my inner child took pure joy in the simple act of climbing on rocks and laying the grass alone. I got a chance to get back to myself which is really important because when you’re single that really is all you have – yourself.

It blows my mind that single girls are conditioned to spend so much time with others, with their girlfriends or out on dates, because that time and energy could just as easily be spent on themselves. Being single is all about finding a balance, but most of the time we forget to implant ourselves in that balance. Instead we tell ourselves we can use the 15 minutes between classes to get our lives together and then we wonder why our lives crumble and burn around us.

Taking time for your self is not the same as taking time by yourself. Somewhere along the way single women picked up a stigma that going out alone as though it’s an embarrassment. Don’t bind yourself to the confines of your couch and Chelsea Lately. As much as going out in public alone may make you reach for your Secret clinical strength deodorant, it can be a really empowering thing as a single chick.

If you’re just starting out, I suggest hitting a local trail with earphones or a dog if you have one. Not only is it totally normal to hit a trail alone, it’s incredibly refreshing to get off campus and get your mind off all of the little annoying things that bog you down during the week, like your roommate’s delusional hipster boyfriend.

Take advantage of Groupon deals at casual restaurants and sit at the bar for a quick bite or linger at a table and catch up on the latest issue of Cosmopolitan. Whatever you choose to do be sure to tuck your cell phone in your purse. This is your chance to totally disconnect from everyone in your life to really just focus on yourself for a while and the time you spend clinging onto your Blackberry is no different from the time you spend with your girls.

So go on and get out there, don’t be nervous or embarrassed, it’s just as much your world as it is a couples’ world!

Got it? Now get the first 19 rules of the Single Girl Society right here.

Lesson 14: Sometimes a hookup is just a hookup.

So after a few too many neon blue shots, you’ve let yourself throw caution to the wind and you’ve found yourself in a pretty disconcerting position with your crush or even worse, a guy friend. In the heat of the moment, you’ve shared a steamy night with a guy that’s got you reelin’ for more, not just physically but emotionally, too.

You start to let your mind wander all of the places you’d never let it before, maybe because he was always just a good friend or because you finally got some kind of response from the crush you’ve had for what feels like forever now. While you’re probably not picking up bridal magazines, unleashing all your crazy, you can’t help but wonder what the two of you could be like together, even if you already know it could never work out with him.

Blame it on the female tendency to attach emotion to sexual activity, but there are just some of us girls out there, who cant help but overthink something as primal and physical as hooking up. No need to be ashamed – after all, it’s only natural! And why shouldn’t you connect sexual activity to emotion? For many girls, sex is a deeply personal thing.

However, when you’re a single girl, sometimes a hookup is just plain and simply that – a hookup. Not every guy you kiss is going to be a prince or your next Noah from The Notebook, and just because you let a guy in physically, doesn’t mean he’s looking to let you in emotionally. Somewhere along the way the scale got a little off balance while most men typically view hooking up as a purely physical act and women search for some kind of emotional extension after.

I’m not by any means stereotyping girls as emotionally needy; there are definitely a lot of girls out there who can view sexual activity as just another source of pleasure and don’t need to make it mean more than it does. But as women, our minds can’t help but wander down the relationship path even if only for a split second.

If there’s anything I’ve learned in single career, it’s that sometimes a hookup is simply a blip on your dating radar. Don’t beat yourself up if nothing emotional comes of a late-night hookup. Not every guy you hook up with is going to be your next boyfriend or even your next date for that matter. If you expect a text or call the next day, I admire your hope and faith in the college dating pool, but don’t tear yourself apart if it doesn’t happen.

Above all, don’t ever feel guilty for giving in to a guilty pleasure hookup just because you don’t spend the next day in a full-on, non-stop texting flirtation with the guy. Take it with a grain of salt – some hookups turn into more and some don’t.

What are the first 13 rules of the Single Girl Society? Click here to find out!

Love.

Here are three more ways to get more love into your Valentine’s Day. Because at the end of the day, and I’m talking about every day, who doesn’t want more love?

And that’s that. So what are your plans for Valentine’s Day?

Eating a cookie tin, 4 at a time, in your undies? Definite don't.

So it’s day 4 of our week long motivational kick in the ass to get all you single ladies out there to see Valentine’s Day in a new, positive way.

First we reminded you of all the wonderful (pause….NOT!!!) things you’re missing by not being in a relationship.

Then we showed you that your laptop/cell phone/iPad are not acceptable Valentine’s Day dates. Yes, even if there is an App for that.

And then we talked about showing yourself some love (not like that.…well, maybe like that if you’ve got the room to yourself and a little free time on your hands…) on V-Day.

And today, Brittany from The College Crush is going to tell you what you shouldn’t be doing come February 14th. That is if you want to maintain your sanity, dignity, friends and chances at love down the road. Which, you know, you should.

Ready? OK!

What else shouldn’t you do on V-Day? Share your advice below.

[Check out the first motivational kicks in the ass for a Kick Ass Valentine's Day right here and here.]

Whether you are single or taken, it all plays out the same: in disappointment that someone else has let you down yet again.  Why not get down to what Valentine’s Day is really about – love – and instead of waiting for someone else to make you happy, why not do it yourself?  What do you LOVE to do?  What makes you happy?  You know what your needs are, you know how they need to be met, so go ahead and be your own attentive little date and take care of yourself.

Jenny Jen from Blonde Bronzed Twenty-something thinks this is the approach we should all take. And if others want to do something kind and generous for us all-too worthy ladies too, then that’s just the icing on the Valentine’s Day cake.

Yeahhh, that's just creepy.

[Check out the first motivational kick in the ass for a Kick Ass Valentine's Day right here.]

So did everyone see the Hallmark commercial plugging Valentine’s Day? If you haven’t seen it, you’ll love this: “Valentine’s Day isn’t about I love you, it’s about I love us.” Commercials like these can make any single woman want to bang her head against a heart-shaped box of Russell Stover chocolates.

Luckily, this year Valentine’s Day falls on a Monday which gives all the single ladies multiple options to choose from:

1) Ignore it completely.
2) Use it as an excuse to go out and spy awkward and over priced dates.
3) Stay home with friends and catch up on your Netflix. After all, The Social Network is available on DVD and who better than a lonely Jesse Eisenberg in a hooded GAP sweatshirt to make you feel better about your own dating life?

The one thing that becomes really tempting is to become “available” with all of your technology….just in case that cute guy that you hooked up with a couple of weeks ago wants to hang out. But resist! Sitting around and waiting by your smart phone, inbox, IM or Gchat waiting for a guy to message you is so much worse than any of the other options, and will buy you a one way ticket on the Crazy Express.

So today Jewels from Techromance Blog begs you to put the technology down, grab a friend and make this Valentine’s Day Kick Ass….no date needed.

Come back (same place, same time) all week for more tips and vids for a kick ass V-day!