Girls, we over-analyze everything. We spend our lives meticulously picking at every detail. We look over everything 20 times before we show our friends for their approval, so they can diligently check it over 20 more times before we go public with an outfit, tweet, text, email or whatever else seems overly important that day.
I, too, am guilty of this incessant checking. I proofread tweets for grammatical errors at least three times before I check to see if there is a better way to rephrase the 140 characters. Perfecting the hashtag, which takes between two and five tries, then follows in this sequence. While I know my 140 characters are not life changing or earth shattering to anyone, including myself, I still keep to my crazy-over-dramatic tweeting ways.
For many girls this extends even further. The “Why hasn’t he texted me back?!” paranoia, that we have all felt, is another unnecessary anxiety that seems like your own personal surprise typhoon. (Although I can promise it will not have such a damaging effect on your life.) That dreamy man-crush not texting you back is in no way a direct reflection on you. There are a hundred thousand reasons he may not have answered in the 2.56935 seconds you are so accustom to receiving texts back from your girlfriends. For lack of space, here are five:
1. He is not attached to his phone the way you are.
2. He had to pee and for the sake of sanitation, he left his phone in his room.
3. After peeing (and washing his hands) he went downstairs to hang with his roommates, whom were all playing PS4.
4. The video games were so enthralling that he decided to crack open a few beers with the guys and play until three in the morning.
5. The combination of Mario Party and drinking is really exhausting, so he fell asleep on the couch, a whole floor away from his phone.
While there is always the possibility that he is hanging out with Sarah, the girl he met while studying abroad in Madrid, your mind needs to be reprogrammed to positive thoughts and the possibility that Mr. Dream Crush may simply be busy.
Another sad, but true anxiety for girls is “Am I spending too much time in the bathroom?” While ancient textbooks and cave man carvings have shown that women do take longer to get ready, bathroom time makes girls anxious. Girls have to un-belt and unzip many layers (especially in this Syracuse snow), so naturally it takes a decent amount of time before you can actually relieve yourself. But what if your zipper breaks? You drop your phone in the toilet? Your shoelace comes untied? You hovered and completely failed? Naturally, you have to take care of all of this, so your bathroom time extends a couple of minutes… but the minutes feel long, and the censor on the toilet keeps flushing, and there is a line for the bathroom! “What are people going to think?!” Obviously, they will think you were taking a dump, and that is not fair because you were totally just cleaning up the bathroom before the next person came in and rescuing your phone from the unsavory waters of the business school’s toilet! (In the event that you were laying a brick, see my viral videos post and invest in poopouri.) Well, before you get all worked up, nervous and sweaty, just remember that when you leave and the next person walks in, they will see the stall is just as smelly as it was before you were there. It will be as if you never peed at all!
Not many things are worth stressing over. Save the meticulous picking and triple checking for things that matter like job interviews and travel itinerary. Do not make yourself crazy over social media, some guy or bathroom etiquette. It is not worth the stress and anxiety that you think it is. Because chances are, no one cares as much as you think they do.