Every friend group has one. She’s a little meaner to you around Valentine’s Day. She can most often be found nagging you about going to your boyfriend’s fraternity on a Friday night while lying in bed watching HGTV. She often tweets terms like “female empowerment” or “make yourself happy first.” Whether by choice or by circumstance, she is your perpetually single friend.
To my perpetually single girlfriends out there, you may think you have it bad, but let’s look past the negatives for a moment. Sure, constantly paying for your own food, not having a stack of oversized men’s shirts to choose from on your “bumming it to my 8 a.m. days,” and having to invest in a human-size teddy bear for cuddle purposes (not knocking it, I’ve actually gone there) may seem a little less than fortunate, but try to look on the bright side. Here are a few reasons why you should savor your time as “that girl” who cries during Say Yes to the Dress.
1. You never have to work out.
Let’s throw the best and most fruitful reason out there first to get the ball rolling. Feeling a little more jiggly these days thanks to our good friends at Sodexo? Who cares! The pressure is off. Boys are constantly making you feel like you need to be photoshoot ready (no thanks to today’s beauty standards). It’s not their fault. They’re constantly exposed to things like the swimsuit edition of every sports magazine ever and one lingerie runway show after another. Blame it on the Y chromosome, society, whatever, but most of the time, the lack of confidence women experience is thanks to some mean boy they encountered along the way. No boyfriend means getting to define your own standard of beauty. Be unapologetic to men who make you feel or have made you feel anything less than perfect.
2. We trust you in our darkest times.
As a miss with a mister, I can speak from experience to tell you just how many times I’ve run sprinted to my perpetually single friend in shambles begging for advice when the love boat is sailing anything but smoothly. We value your advice because it is unbiased, your mind is not clouded with subconscious thoughts of your own significant other. You don’t have a boyfriend (not to remind you), so if you think it’s stupid when we are crying that he bought a yellow bow tie for formal instead of a gold one, you’re not afraid to tell us that we need to snap out of it, quit being a “psycho girlfriend.” All in all, you constantly have our best interests in mind when we come to you with mascara running down our cheeks. You’re not afraid to tell us exactly what we need to hear, no matter how brutally honest.
3. One day, sooner than you think, you won't be the perpetually single friend anymore.
We have all done (or will do) our time as the girl who gets a little too excited to binge watch a season of Netflix on a Friday night. It can suck when all your girlfriends are on dates, but it can be awesome when you’re the one guiltlessly eating all the cheese fries while telling your sobbing best friend, “I told you so,” (in a loving way, we know). But it happens to the best of us. Someday when you least expect it, the boy you only imagined in fairy tales will come along and tell you how beautiful you look in leggings with seven-days-unwashed hair. He’ll dance around the kitchen with you until the sun comes up, and he’ll laugh at how cute you look when you tell him you burned the first meal you ever cooked for him...even if it's on his birthday. He’s going to see all the amazing, wonderful parts of you we knew were there all along. And finally, we will get to be the ones who tell you we told you so, because for all the times you were the shoulder for us to lean on, you finally will have the shoulder you never knew you were looking for all along.
