Ladies, we need to talk. Why is it that every time I get my heart broken, one of my friends is so ready to just hand me a margarita and make it a party?
No, seriously. Think back on any of the times you’ve broken up with someone. You hop into your group chat and drop the bomb – “Brad and I split up” – immediately after the first wave of messages (OMG I’m soooo sorry or he didn’t deserve you) someone pops in to say, “we’ll have a girls night, do shots, you’ll forget you ever knew this guy.”
How in the hell is that healthy?
Believe me, I am fond of a good girls’ night out. Getting all made up and dressed to the nines with my girlfriends before hitting the bar for shots and karaoke can be so fun. But why is overdoing that our only coping mechanism? Why do we make one person’s emotional suffering into a fun group outing?
Why is the phenomenon so impersonal, so focused on avoiding actual emotion, on “distracting” ourselves from hurt rather than supporting each other through it?
It’s not like any healthy sort of conversation ever comes of it, usually. Sure, you’ll try to do the talking-it-out thing initially, but how long does that last before someone suggests hitting on someone new? Or getting completely obliterated, or in some other way distracting you from feeling your emotions entirely?
One drink? Two? And then your best bud Kate says, “I know what’ll make you feel better, Vegas bombs!” and off you go.
It’s completely bizarre to me, and yet I’ve participated in this unusual ritual more times than I can count. I’ve absolutely stood there, putting on mascara and feeling horrible inside, thinking wow, I’m kinda sad, I need my friends as they stand right behind me adjusting their heels and giggling in high voices about how drunk they’re going to get me because I “definitely need it.”
I’d miss the silly teenage days when we used to sit in a circle in our sleeping bags and stay up all night and have heart-to-hearts about what bothered us. But now that we’re in our twenties, that’s been replaced by stilettos and cheap well drinks.
There’s something seriously wrong with female breakup culture that we feel like the only way to handle a broken heart – or any sort of emotional trauma surrounding relationships – is by getting so drunk that someone is holding your heels for you while you call everyone an Uber to drive you three streets.
Our first reaction to hearing that a friend got dumped is to liquor her up and throw her into the minefield of new men, and I think that speaks to a larger issue within our society.
It’s especially messed up that there’s a silent pressure to go out and flirt as soon as you’ve got enough “liquid courage” to hit the dance floor with your friends. I’ve only just lost someone I really liked spending time with, but instead of talking to my friends about how I’m feeling, I’m being pushed and prodded and told: “he’s cute go say something!” I feel like leaving the bar without a phone number is putting the group effort to rehabilitate my sad self to waste.
My male friends never did this to me, for the most part. I would tell them what was wrong and immediately I would get an arm around my shoulder, someone would ask if I want to talk about it, and they’d listen while I worked through what I needed to feel before I could get back on my feet. Usually, by the end of the night, they’d given me a ton of emotional support, some very sound advice, and a few good laughs before we have a healthy number of drinks and someone drops me off at home.
Going out with female friends is another story. I can barely get the words about my breakup out of my mouth before someone – it’s usually the same one or two people every time – says “we need to get you drunk.” Back in the day I’d let them do it and play along, go home completely sick and still left to handle all my sadness once I got back to my dorm alone. So now I’m just as sad over Brad or Greg or Paul or what have you, but I am also full of a lot of tequila I probably stopped asking for around midnight and will be stuck in bed retching into a trash can all morning tomorrow. Yuck.
This isn’t to say that men are inherently better at coaching their friends through heartbreak. When an entire gender is raised to believe being strong means never crying or showing “feminine” emotion, there are bound to be communication and emotional processing handicaps. Society hasn’t been fair to men emotionally and it’s caused its own issues, but that’s an entirely different article I’ll gladly tackle another time.
Women, however, have a set ritual of getting their sad friend as drunk as possible and encouraging her to immediately seek out new romantic prey, a practice that is unhealthy on so many levels I really have to wonder why it’s still so popular.
The fact that it becomes a celebratory event for the entire group too is unusual to me and is just chock full of red flags – instead of helping Emma with her breakup, we’re now helping Chelsea get some guy’s number while Kate and Becky go shot for shot in a drinking contest.
Everyone is hyping each other up, gossiping and giggling while they get dressed up to go celebrate their friend’s “welcome” back into the dating pool. The whole thing ends up on Instagram and Snapchat, #GirlsNightOut, and it becomes a funny memory everyone talks about for the rest of the week. But when did Emma’s sadness become a cause for a party in the first place, and why is everyone else profiting emotionally from it?
I think I get on the surface why it happens. We think that by bringing our friend out for the night we’re encouraging her to remember she can still have fun, and we think that distracting her from her sadness is the best way to keep her busy and help her be happy in the long run. But I think it speaks to the larger, societal issues pressed upon women that we think binge-drinking and acquiring new men are the best ways to handle that.
It’s no secret that alcohol has become an alarmingly huge part of what it means to be a woman surviving her womanness in America – it’s a coping mechanism thrust upon us that we just seem to eat right up, that we used to define and validate ourselves. It’s marketed to us as a reward for surviving the daily struggles that come along with being mothers, women in the workforce, female students and scholars, so why shouldn’t we take it and enjoy it? Who cares if the exact people who are paying us less and staring at our rear ends as we leave the office are the ones making the ads, selling the wine, putting it into our hands?
As for the party atmosphere, the hunting for new romantic partners, and the enthusiastic posting? Well, at that point, it’s pretty possible that we’re in the same emotionally suppressed boat as men – the better we are at pretending not to care about what’s bothering us, the stronger we are. In this day and age, we women need to feel strong. We feel we need to prove ourselves. Emotional vulnerability is a luxury we don’t feel we can afford. I didn’t let some man hurt me! No one can reject me! I’m out at 3am in my shortest, glitteriest dress and most painful shoes and my makeup is still perfect and I have the phone numbers of five new guys saved to my contacts now so fuck you for thinking I’m hurt or broken. I am having fun. If we look okay we are okay, and it’s so ingrained in us that we need to always, always look okay.
I’m not here to preach about quitting drinking altogether, or say you should stay in singing Kumbaya and making friendship bracelets instead. Believe me, girls’ nights are fun. And I’m not giving up my gin and tonics or sangria anytime soon. But it’s weird to me that we never just talk about our breakups with our friends anymore, not unless we’re all wasted. I think at this point we can acknowledge that binge-drinking our breakups away is an unhealthy pattern we need to seek to fix, and one that’s reflective of larger issues in our society.
So next time your friend comes to you saying they’ve been dumped, invite them over to talk before you make plans to go out. Spend a day or two checking up on them, letting them vent, letting them cry. Maybe hole up and watch Dirty Dancing a couple hundred times a la Jess Day from New Girl, whatever floats your boat. But don’t tell your friend she needs to get totally trashed with you and eight other people in order to get over her ex. It’s 2018, you guys, we can do better.
