5 Reasons You Shouldn’t Compete With Your BFF’s New Boyfriend

For months you’ve had someone who would pick apart Facebook wedding albums with you about why the Mrs. Soon-To-Be-So-and-So couldn’t afford an open bar because she spent so much money on the god awful coral mermaid-cut gown. You and your bestie would jog around in your yoga pants and complimentary girl power, self-righteous in the comfort of not needing or wanting a man. You’re too busy throwing back Alabama slammers after a long day of getting your mogul in the making on climbing the career ladder. Who needs a boyfriend when you’ve got a bestie?

But then it happens. It starts with a sexy Trey Songz look-a-like at happy hour, licking his lips and sneaking glances at your girl from the bar. You low-key peep her making eye contact and running her fingers through her Bobbi Boss all smitten-like and in no time he’s getting his Bottoms Up on at your table. Next thing you know, it’s two weeks later, and you’re getting sporadic responses to your texts and home girl is repeatedly postponing that jog because she’s too winded in the wee morning hours from getting her boots smoked from Mr. Steal Yo’ Girl.

Yep, he did that. And that familiar feeling of being annoyed by absolutely nothing and picking apart your girl’s new relationship is jealousy. And not necessarily jealousy because you want some of what she has, but more so just a case of you missing your friend. But before you go making an enemy out about of your new friend by default, consider how making her man your competition could eventually leave you all alone:

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Why Purging Won’t Solve Your Problems

At some point, all women will come through an experience in their lives that will lead them to the idea of purging their problems away. It might be a bad break up, an unexpected job lay off or the breakdown of a friendship that you’ve realized is a very parasitic part of your life. Some of us will delete all the numbers off our phones believing clearing our contacts will cleanse our conscience. Others will sift through their Facebook friends, go natural and cut off all the processed parts of their hair or get rid of all the Pop Secret and Pringles in the kitchen cabinets.

On Tuesday, we witnessed our favorite anti-hero Mary Jane attempt to purge her problems away on BET’s Being Mary Jane. After yet another failed attempt to make a wrong relationship get right with ex-boyfriend, David, MJ finds herself frantically vacuuming her house in the early morning hours before pouring top shelf tequila down her drain and embarking on a self-help journey through “Johari’s window”. She’s desperate and dying to discover what ever made her sink to the levels of trying to get pregnant by a man who is already expecting a child with another woman.

When you’re drowning it’s all too easy to be so desperate to be saved that you end up jumping on the first driftwood raft you see when the Carnival Cruise Ship is only a few feet in the distance. Purging your problems away rarely works because it doesn’t matter how many friends you delete or material items you through away, if you’re only ridding yourself of symptoms of the problem and not the actual problem you’ll always end up unhappy.

If you’re deleting all of your Facebook friends because you’re tired of seeing bullshit, the problem isn’t your friends, the problem is what made you accept those friend requests in the first place and why does their cyber bullshit affect your ability to function in life so much. It’s Facebook, people. You can log off and move the fuck on with your very real life without deleting a damn soul. I always say if your timeline is full of bullshit that says more about the company you choose to keep on-line than other people’s issues. My timeline is full of grad school congrats, wedding pictures and newborn babies, not baby daddy drama and chicks beefing off of whose LV bag is real or not. What about yours?

Also, life is about balance. Clearing your contacts and getting rid of all your liquor is like douching your life. You need a balance of both good and bad things, otherwise after completely cleaning house you risk overcompensating and ending up with the infection you initially started with. You don’t always need to get rid of the bad, you need to learn how to better deal with it since it is inevitably a part of life.

In addition, when it comes to the fragile balance of bad habits, there are times in life that are simply about survival. And as long as you don’t drop too far in the rabbit hole and start developing an unhealthy dependency, sometimes it’s OK to develop a few bad habits if it means in the long run you become a better person.

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