Girls all want to be loved. Sometimes I wonder whether that isn’t our perpetual goal in life – to find that one boy who will give us that incomparable feeling of being cared for and adored. Some people think this is because we’re the weaker sex. I disagree. In economics and finance, there exists this idea of hedging versus speculating. Boys spread their ambitions, if not equally, at least somewhat more evenly, among various interests – sports, careers, friends, and yes, girls. This is called diversification. By placing small “bets” on a variety of areas of life, boys are spreading their risk around, in effect, hedging. Girls, on the other hand, tend to gamble all their assets (or at least a very large portion of their assets) on one stake: love. This kind of zero-sum gambling is called speculation. In effect, girls may be dumber, but we’re also definitely braver.
But what happens when girls begin to challenge societal norms and try to live by the code of boys? Is it really that impossible for girls to live by the golden rule of boys, “bros before hoes”?
For one thing, it’s tortuous. There’s a Chinese idiom for being jealous that compares the bitter-sour-spicy feeling to “eating vinegar.” Well, there’s one thing sourer than “eating vinegar,” and that’s not having the right to “eat vinegar.” When a girl is hanging out in a large group with a couple of friends she called together, she tends to feel the need to play hostess. After all, the unifying point for all these people is that they’re all HER friends. So she tries to be more perceptive about which individuals in the group are being left out or seem uncomfortable with everyone else and distribute her attention accordingly. Cue the entrance of the boy that makes her heart a little fluttery and her mind a little blank. Now imagine the scene. One girl, her mind filled with one boy. Add to her surroundings four pretty, also single girl friends. And one quiet boy friend who doesn’t really talk to anyone but her. Now draw in THE boy. He is cute and charming and friendly and so not hers. And you have the classic question in the making: bros or hoes?
She has a couple different options here. After all, love may be a zero-sum game, but the game of love most certainly isn’t! The girl’s natural instinct is to ignore everyone else in the group and focus her attention completely and absolutely on THE boy. Her natural instinct may even dictate the need to find a way to remove him from the company of all of her girl friends. But she’s not a bitch, or at least she tries not to be one. So what does she do? She could go the opposite extreme and be all “bros” and no “hoes.” After all, her friends all love him so he’ll be totally okay if she leaves him be (but he’s still HERS, she’ll angrily tell herself, she met him FIRST!) and devotes her time and energy solely to her quiet boy friend and anyone else who seems to be left alone. But then she sits there, pretending to listen to her friend talk about computer science or biology lectures, while glaring daggers at THE boy who is having way too much fun chatting with one of her girl friends. And she has no right to be jealous because she could very well be sitting there chatting with him if it weren’t for all this “bros before hoes” nonsense. So what does the girl do? Every time he smiles at one of the other girls is agonizing (“you can’t hate your friend, you can’t hate your friend” she keeps repeating to herself). Every second not spent at his side is wasted (“but you have to look out for your other friends and make sure they’re not left out!”). The seconds become minutes and the minutes become hours and the hours become a raging headache and an intense need to cry (“you little idiot, he’s not yours you know, he’s his own person!”).
And then? The girl and the boy share a beat-up black umbrella in the pouring rain, her arm in his, and she forgets about everything else and everyone else. All of a sudden, the world, in all its wet, gusty, freezing glory, is perfect, just the way it is.
The end? Not quite. The story continues in text messages and instant messages that are exchanged and in those texts and IMs that are never sent. It winds on through a friend’s engagement party and tunnels through photos of the afternoon together. One second is filled with hope; the next is brimming with despair. The girl starts to feel like the Katy Perry song: “stuck on a roller-coaster, can’t get off this ride.” She starts to question why she ever “got on the ride” in the first place. Wasn’t she happier before? Hadn’t she resolved to keep relationships and boys out of her life for the foreseeable future? When did this happen? (Did he have her at the first words they exchanged (which she remembers so vividly)? Did he have her at the first smile? Did he have her at the first exchange of facebook wall messages? Did he have her at the first IM conversation? Did he have her at the second meeting when he came to a party to see her? Or did he already have her when her eyes swept quickly over his face as she looked for a seat on the bus?)
My conclusion? Loving boys isn't nearly as worthwhile as loving yourself
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