By college, we’ve learned that sometimes the one that we want doesn’t always want us. And at that point it doesn’t matter that you would’ve loved him for the rest of his life, or that he promised you he’d never hurt you. Because the only thing that matters when your heart begins to crack again for the first time in a long time is you.

Lesson #51: Make Yourself Your Priority

We’ve all heard the advice from our best girlfriends in times of heartbreak—“Don’t waste tears on a guy who walked away from you when they were falling down your face,” “Don’t lose sleep over a guy who isn’t losing sleep over you,” and my personal favorite, “You were so much hotter than him anyways!” Whether any of it’s true or not isn’t the point, what matters is what you turn the situation into.

Rest assured you are not stupid, you are not a masochist, and you are not an emotional/psychological cutter. You fell hard. And then you looked up from your fall and realized you were alone. That’s all. Don’t look into it and try to make it some kind of representation of your overall personality. Take this one situation to deal with and move on from. It’s hard enough getting over heartbreak without being bogged down by your entire dating history simply because you’re desperate to make some kind of psychological breakthrough about yourself that probably isn’t even true anyways. Give yourself a real chance because heartbreak is hard enough to get through without you being hard on yourself. Read More »

So Glamour magazine tells you you’re supposed to wear sexy underwear even if you’re staying in for the night, and your mother says you’re supposed to keep an open mind — even if that means going on a blind date with a family friend who you’re pretty sure used to get high on cleaning products — and people keep telling you you’re the crazy one?

Lesson #48 – You’re not crazy, you’re just single.

As single girls, every now and then someone is bound to call you crazy. Sometimes it’s warranted, like when you’re screaming at your ex outside a bar only to realize it’s just a guy who looks like your ex from far away (and with drunk goggles on), and sometimes it’s not-so-warranted, like when you pass on the party everyone’s been talking about simply because you don’t feel like putting on makeup. I mean, there is, after all, a difference between crazy and lazy. Needless to say, at some point in our single lives, we’re going to feel like we’ve not only lost control, but are spinning further and further away from reality. Read More »

Regardless of your relationship status, there will be situations and the people that stir them up, who at any point in time, will have you questioning what’s really important in life. It just so happens, though, that probability of that sort of drama infiltrating your life spikes when you’re single. There are some people who take the dating game a little too seriously, who extract meanings from things everybody else thinks are harmless, and more often than not, those people are looking for someone to blame. Luckily, the Single Girl Society has you covered with a general rule of thumb on how to deal with people who don’t always have your best interest in heart, or for that matter, don’t even really have a heart.

Lesson #47: When it comes to people: If they’re toxic, cut them out, and if they’re people you wish you could be more like, hold them tight.

There really only are two kinds of people in our lives: life ruiners — those that make you wonder how you’ll get by; and life savers — those who you wouldn’t be able to get through the hardship without. Read More »

I try not to draw inspiration for these columns from movies, as they are not reality, but sometimes a movie comes along and gets me thinking. Last night, I dug up an old favorite, Some Kind of Wonderful, and settled into my couch. As I re-watched the classic, I found myself disgruntled with a particular quote despite having seen it several times before.

The infamous Amanda Jones so famously said, “I’d rather be with someone else for the wrong reasons than alone for the right.”

Lesson #39 – So you’re alone, so what?

Of course, ironically Amanda Jones ends up alone but I think that we’re fooling ourselves if we don’t believe there are girls in the world who don’t subscribe to the belief that anything is better than being alone. When did being single become a stepping stone between boyfriends? When did we all lose ourselves in the dating rat race and forget that we can stand alone as individuals? Read More »

Lesson 36 – You don’t have to give up your peep-toes be a guy’s girl.

My first serious boyfriend lived in a house with four other guys, where pizza night was every night, Miller Light was considered the nectar of gods and the closest thing to window treatments were posters of Anna Kournikova. After two years of being the only girlfriend who stuck around, while my boyfriend’s four roommates’ brought by virtually every Ashley, Chelsea and Lindsey within county lines, I couldn’t take it anymore. I finally asked my boyfriend to tell me what these poor girls were doing wrong or if his friends were just womanizing douchebags. He laughed and he said, “Mostly my friends are just jerks, but then again the girls who walk in and out of here don’t really make an effort to fit in, they sit here in their mini-skirts and high heels and laugh nervously and smile the whole time, you can tell they’re not comfortable.” Ever since then I haven’t been able to shake this whole concept of being a guy’s girl.

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Lesson #35 – Girl Talk can kill your dating life

Sometimes as a single girl in college it feels like your dating life is split in two halves—one spent actually dating guys and the other spent in coffee shops with your girlfriends talking about dating said guys. So if half of our dating world is actually spent dating, what exactly is the other half spent on? I’d say probably too many lattes and not enough sensible advice. I’m as guilty as the next girl. I say I don’t want to talk about something and sure enough 20 minutes later, my friends have pulled it out of me and now I’ve somehow connected something as minute as my guy not noticing my new slingbacks to his daddy issues that I’ve now taken the liberty of convincing myself he has, even though he clearly doesn’t. So girls analyze their love lives, what’s new, right?

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There’s always going to be that one girl in your group of friends who seems to take personal pride in your current single status. Regardless of whether she’s single or not, or even somewhere in between (aka dating some aspiring rapper who has a recurrent gig at the local BBQ joint with his not-so-talented beat-boxing cousin), it seems the night hasn’t ended until she’s gone out of her way to make you feel bad about your single life. Since a bitchy attitude has yet to hold up as a reasonable excuse for murder in court, just know there are plenty of other ways to deal with Miss I-Hate-My-Life-So-I’m-Going-To-Make-You-Hate-Yours-Too.

Lesson #34 – How To Deal With A Mean Girl, maturely and not-so-maturely.

First, you can follow your mom’s advice and brush her and her snide remarks off. Don’t get me wrong, I love my mother and she has given me some amazing life advice (examples include, “When it comes to coffee stains, dab, don’t rub” and my personal favorite, “It’s time you found some inner peace, dammit”) but let’s face it, there are just some days you don’t feel like being the bigger person. I respect the girls who can walk away from every snide comment, just like our mothers preached, because it really does takes more empowerment to walk away. But on days when you get sick of ignoring Miss Thang and her attitude, you can try some of these methods. Read More »

Lesson #33: Quirky girls finish last.

There are certain girls who can make guys swoon with nothing more than look, a switch of the hips and maybe a cleverly timed wink. I will never be one of those girls. Unfortunately, I trip over things, lots of things, and on any given hectic morning, I’m likely to leave the house with mascara smeared on my nose. Maybe I’m not charming or adorable and I assure you that no one will ever refer to me as “the sweetest little thing they ever did lay eyes on,” but I have to admit, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Maybe I’m just too lazy to be that positive all the time or maybe my pessimism is practically inherent, but just because I’m not a “nice girl,” doesn’t mean I don’t have a heart of gold. And so maybe I’ve gotten into a tussle with one too many vending machines for stealing my dollar but it’s not like I’m kicking kittens. We can’t all be “the girl next door,” but niceness doesn’t have to be measured by how much you smile and politely laugh at jokes you don’t actually find funny.

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So the first three months of your new romance have you got you sleeping over at his place every night, catching every meal together and bailing on girls’ night for a cuddlefest. While I hate to rain on your “young-and-in-love” parade, let me remind you that falling in love and gambling have a lot in common – it can be easy to lose it all but not so easy to get it all back.

Lesson 32: Don’t lose yourself in loving him.

When I listen to girls who’ve just met a great guy, it never seems as though loving that guy is enough for them. It’s as if they are trying to become him as they surround themselves with his friends, start living by his schedule, catering to his beliefs even if they go against everything they’d ever stood for in the past. What they fail to realize is that everything they do, every decision they make is really just his. You can love a man without emulating him.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, as it seems that girls can never hear this advice enough – single or not, live your life. You’d think that after years of our mothers and friends hammering this into our minds, it’d be second nature and yet, so many girls find themselves lost without the one they love. Being heartbroken is one thing, being lost is an entirely other thing. Don’t ever get so wrapped up in loving another person that you lose yourself in the process. There’s only one of you, which makes you pretty damn rare, so hold tight to who you are and what you believe in.

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Lesson 31: Abandon your safety reserves.

Safety Reserves – we all have them. Perhaps you know them by a different name – backups, the one you love to drunk dial/text, the one who never really makes it to the top of your list and is always the first to fall to the back of the line, the one you wish you could like a little more but since you don’t not get along, can’t completely block out. These people, while probably a priority in someone else’s mind, rarely wash up on our dating preference shores.

If you hold a lackluster view toward someone, what exactly makes you feel that keeping them on the back burner is going to make you eventually like them? It’s like we convince ourselves we’ll fall for them, which isn’t fair to the other person of course, but it also isn’t fair to yourself. Read More »