Girl Talk

I’ve started to hate weekends. I never thought I’d hear myself say that either, but it’s true. The weekdays are so packed with classes, work, homework and meetings (and that’s just on a light week), that there’s virtually no time for anything else. But the weekends…the weekends are so un-packed that they have become the days of drama.

The last several weekends have centered on the most recent break-up in my life. (The fact that it took weeks should clue you in to the amount of drama associated with it). I actually spent a great deal of Sunday night bitching to one of my girlfriends, telling her all the things I’d just found out about. Though I knew that this guy was completely unworthy of the time I was spending being angry at him, that knowledge did nothing to make me feel better.

After about an hour, my girlfriend shared something with me that one of our sorority sisters had said to her during her last break-up, “Yeah this sucks, but it’s the Universal Girl Feeling.”

Talk about insight. The Universal Girl Feeling. That really crappy, post-break-up feeling that makes us sit around and whine (or in my case, rant) to our friends about how much he sucks and why. It’s what makes us suddenly lose our appetites for days or weeks at a time, or cry ourselves to sleep. Maybe all that sounds very dramatic, but it’s more realistic than you think.

But the most important side effect of the Universal Girl Feeling, is that it closes us off. Every time we get screwed over, we get a little more suspicious and a little less open. Some of us (myself included) just shut down our emotions entirely. It’s like a computer on overload—when we can’t deal with everything coming at us all at once, we freeze up and thereby avoid dealing with anything.

Is closing ourselves off emotionally really better than crying into our roommate’s arms? Maybe, maybe not, but I didn’t shed one tear over the liar all weekend, and I’m proud of it! It’s really a personal call. I, for one, am done crying over guys who aren’t worth my tears (and any guy worth my tears wouldn’t make me cry in the first place). So why my sudden refusal to break down over break-ups?

Because I say there has to be a better (and healthier) way to deal with the realization that he’s everything he swore to you he wasn’t.

Not hungry? Eat lighter rather than not eating at all. Order salads. Have fruit and granola for breakfast. Eating lighter and healthier will honestly make you feel better, emotionally and physically.

Instead of crying yourself to sleep, take a late-night run. Get your adrenaline going—exercise releases endorphins, and endorphins make you happy. It’s a win-win situation, because not only do you get to feel better in the moment, but working out will also increase your hotness factor, and that always makes you feel better.

My girlfriend’s advice was to make a “boys suck” playlist on iTunes. Fill it with songs like Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone”, Avril Lavigne’s “Don’t Tell Me” and Jessica Andrews’ “There’s More to Me Than You”, then blast it from your computer or car stereo. I love driving too fast with the windows down and the music blaring after I find out that my latest Mr. Perfect is really just Mr. Loser in disguise.

But my absolute favorite thing to do after a break-up is to make a change. Something drastic, or at least something fun. Personally, I like to dye my hair (Sunday night it went from dark blonde to dark red). You could buy an outfit you never thought you could pull off. Or go to that place behind Malibu Speedzone and do the bungee jumping thing.

If you’re not so daring, try an outrageous shade of nail polish. Maybe rearrange your furniture or learn to cook Indian food.

The point is to do something new and totally unassociated with him. Do something just for you. When you feel like a new person it’s hard to dwell on old feelings and heartbreaks.

There are three things that helped me get over this guy so quickly (three hours is pretty fast for me). The hair dye was the first. The second was my girlfriend’s words of wisdom. Being able to talk to someone who understood what I was feeling made it easier to deal with, because I wasn’t dealing with it alone.

That’s why we call it the Universal Girl Feeling — because almost every girl out there has felt it at one point or another. We can all relate. So no matter what time of the day or night I feel upset over a break-up, I can be guaranteed that somewhere in the world, there is another girl out there feeling exactly the same way I do, and that’s actually a pretty comforting thought.

It was the end of Sunday night’s conversation that provided the third element in my get-the-hell-over-him formula: the hope of something better. Apparently over the weekend, my girlfriend realized just how in love one of our sisters and her boyfriend really were and she just had to share it with me.

And instead of being bitter that she had something I felt I had just been cheated out of, I felt good knowing that there were two terrific people out there who managed to find each other. I left feeling great—like I’d just crossed one more jerk off the list and could move on and find a guy who actually deserves me. And that should be a Universal Girl Feeling, too.