I don’t mean to be a Single Sally Always A Bridesmaid Never A Bride Party Pooper here or anything, but I’ve got to vent.

For as much as I want to see my friends happy and support them when they are in love, I have to admit, there are a couple things about most relationships that really gross me out. Namely? Co-dependency.

It doesn’t take long and I’m sure you have seen it. Your friend starts dating someone new. Soon, that person is all they talk about anymore. They can come out and hang, but only if they bring this new person with them. That wouldn’t be a problem EXCEPT they don’t act exactly naturally around that person. You start to feel alienated and so you try to invite your friend out for some one on one time. Canceled plans start becoming more frequent than they ever were before the ’significant’ other came into play and you feel guilty for even thinking it…but who the f*ck does your friend think you are?

A freelance for hire friend, perhaps? A…”he’s busy tonight and I’m bored so lets hang out” friend? A…”he really ticked me off and I want to vent” friend?

This isn’t just one of my friends. It’s MANY of my friends all through my history. I suppose an argument could be that I need to come to terms with relationships, but you know what? When I have a boyfriend, I don’t blow my friends off for him! Plans are plans are plans. I keep my word and I expect my friends to as well. I love the fact that the people I care about know that my shoulder is here for them to cry on, but I can’t lie, sometimes I feel a little more than frustrated with those friends who are so easily swayed to the nesting grounds.

They used to love partying until HE said it was ’slutty’ or made some comment of the sort. Read More »

Let me just start out by saying that I didn’t care for the movie Juno. It got progressively better towards the end, yes, but for much of the movie, the writing was absolutely appalling. After the exchange with the convenience store clerk at the beginning of the film, I had to get an usher to help me find my eyes because they had rolled clear out of my head. Juno is hip, Diablo, I get it, please stop beating me over the head with those million dollar shoes you didn’t end up wearing.

That being said, her writing isn’t why I dislike Diablo Cody as a whole. It’s also not her vomitously rebel-cutsie name, although it does make me cringe a little bit every time I hear it. Like when it was announced at the Oscars. For winning best screenplay.

Admittedly, my dislike is partially rooted in that Cody reminds of the girl who is always at the coffee shop, reading Kurt Vonnegut and making me feel intensely uncool. “That girl” also has all these esoteric tattoos and an inexplicable haircut that I would never grow the balls to attempt. Cody seems a little more approachable than “that girl”, however, which is a point in her favor. Read More »

Knowing when to end a long term friendship can be more difficult than any of us would ever like to admit. Wouldn’t it just be a hell of a lot easier if our oldest and supposedly closest friends never bugged out? If they could just stay calm and always be that chill girl we used to kick it with…all would be well with the world. But the fact of the matter is this: A lot of girls go “crazy” eventually and this easily includes girls you’ve known “forever”.

Not that long ago, I moved my best friend since elementary school into my apartment. At first, it was totally awesome. Despite the fact that we had certainly had more than one rough patch in our history of being friends; we were still getting along rather famously once we were living together. That was…of course…until I really started to see how nuts she was.

She was a pathological liar. But this was something that I had always known. She was obsessive with guys. This too was something that I had always known. She had a high level of respect and regard for me…again, something that I had always known. However, I had no clue how far she could possibly take any of these aspects of her character.

FIRST came the jealousy. I had recently started to rearrange my diet and lifestyle, finally putting my foot down and wanting to be healthier over all. In the process of doing this, I ended up dropping a few pounds. She, on the other hand, had always struggled with her weight, but was never quite willing to compromise her tendency to over-eat in exchange for the body she wanted. So when I dropped down to 125 at 5′7 (please note that this is a totally acceptable weight), she started to accuse me of being “scary skinny” and actually called me Nicole Richie. Read More »

When I was 15, I got my first boyfriend. We fell in love, had sex for about three months, and then broke up.

I was devastated. Like many young women, I had internalized the idea that a “good girl” only ever sleeps with one guy. In a society where sex before marriage is no longer taboo, sex in a relationship that doesn’t last forever is still frowned upon.

Perhaps the breakup wouldn’t have been as hard to bear if I had been able to better differentiate between sex and love. It took me many years — and many partners — to learn that sex doesn’t have to equal love in order to be good.

Unfortunately, I did learn that sex needs to be free of emotional baggage in order to be good. On the rebound from my first relationship, I f#cked my way through my grief. Nothing ever satisfied, and each breakup left me feeling even emptier.

I eventually screwed myself, figuratively at least. I got into an emotionally abusive relationship that ended with some tough lessons a year and a half later. Basically, after 18 months of possessiveness and jealous accusations, I slapped my boyfriend, and he promptly turned me in for domestic violence. A moment’s bad decision cost me $650 in fines and restitution, and nine months of therapy. Read More »

“There’s a really hot guy in my Shakespeare class,” my girlfriend informed her roommate and me during lunch the other day. My first immediate thought was “Why have I not seen this guy?”. My second immediate thought was “I wonder exactly how hot he is.”

It didn’t really occur to me at all that I should have been jealous or angry or even concerned, and my girlfriend seemed just about as intrigued as I did when I told her about the tall, silent, fairly attractive guy in the corner of my Shakespeare class.

Ogling is a tricky little subject. The problem is that just because you now have a girl doesn’t mean every other gal and/or guy instantly ceases to be attractive. Hot people still exist (thank God), and there isn’t some magical on/off switch that makes you think your girl is the hottest one on the planet (not that this is a bad thing to think).

It also kind of complicates matters that ogling when you’re in a girl/girl relationship is one of the things that’s VERY different from the way it is in a girl/boy relationship. It depends all on your significant other’s personality, of course; I’m not gonna say that ALL girls are okay with ogling and ALL guys are against it. For me, though, I’ve never had a boyfriend who entirely appreciated me leaning to the side and checking out that one guy’s amazingly shaped ass or that girl’s near perfect rack. My girl now is totally okay with it. So what’s the big deal? Read More »

As if avoiding any sexual contact with my own co-workers wasn’t concern enough, now I’ve come to realize it’s best not to get freaky with anyone‘s co-worker.

Explanation:

My friend, I’ll call her “Alyssa”, works in finance. So obviously, all of her co-workers are hot men. She’s kept things platonic there since she’s smart and now these cute money-makers are her pals. This means we all hang out on a semi-regular bar-going basis, thus allowing male/female attraction to develop.

Now my roommate, “Kelly”, has had her eye on one of these fellows for a while, and the two of them have been flirting for months. So it was only a matter of time before they wound up in bed together.

I mean, I wasn’t surprised. But Alyssa, well, she was kind of pissed. Read More »

Jealousy is a bitch.

You can’t deny that at times your blood starts to boil when you see another guy checking out your beautiful lady. Luckily, you aren’t alone. Jealousy is a natural human emotion. Merriam-Webster likes to define it as “being threatened by and/or hostile toward a rival.”

Acting out on jealousy tendencies is often considered a bad thing. But is it really so terrible to express those feelings? Read More »

Sooner or later, your boyfriend will turn into your ex.So the question becomes: Can you stay friends with the person who once held you when your goldfish died?

Although there is no one answer to a question that has plagued couples (and their new mates) for centuries, there are a few guidelines that can make a confusing time a little easier to deal with.

Most importantly, the circumstances that contributed to the break-up can offer a clue. For most couples who parted on (relatively) civil terms, maintaining a close friendship afterwards only means that one of you started playing for the other team (read: not very common).

On the other hand, staying friend-ly is only a natural progression of a once-intimate relationship. Read More »