If you claim that you’re the “best wingwoman ever,” you’re probably not. A good wingwoman doesn’t even want to be a wingwoman, because her worst nightmare is putting on makeup and going to a bar and being around a bunch of guys she’s not gonna hook up with. The main mission of a wingwoman is to hype up her friend, make her feel like a goddess, and let her have her choice of the dick buffet.

To be a good wingwoman, you need to support your girl subtly and solidly. Do not—we repeat, do not—flirt with the guy she’s into for your own personal validation. We all have that friend who loves to flirt even if she has a boyfriend, who will steal the attention of anyone’s man just to boost her own ego. If your girl needs a wingwoman, chances are she might be a little timid or shy. If you’re the type of gal who goes up to all the guys and is overly chatty, chances are the guy is going to end up liking you instead of your friend. If you really want some extra wingwoman points, maybe forget to wash your hair or to put on makeup that night. Also, you need to know when to make your exit. Don’t overstay your welcome and become an annoying third wheel when your friend is trying to give you a sign to get the hell out.

If you’re going to take your wingwoman responsibility one step further and play cupid, tread lightly. Setting up two friends can really complicate your friend circles when things go south (which they most likely will), and then you have to start picking sides and avoiding people. When you tell your girlfriend you want to set her up with her soul mate, you start planting unhealthy seeds in her mind that will probably never amount to anything more than a one-night stand. If you think two of your friends are meant to be, don’t say a word. Instead, throw a party or organize drinks, and conveniently invite both people. If you sense some romantic vibes, approach each of them separately and say, “Isn’t John so cute? I think he might be into you!” and “Oh, isn’t Sarah such a catch? She’s one of my best friends, and I feel like you two would really get along.” Boom! You did your work, and now you walk away.

A Dozen Red Flags? I Love Them!

Your wingwoman duties don’t just end when your friend finds her guy. We all have to stay on high alert and say something when we see a big red flag in our gal’s relationship. It’s real easy to get stuck in the DICKSAND, and it’s almost impossible to think logically with love goggles on. But this doesn’t give you the go-ahead to talk about your friend’s guy every time he makes a grammar mistake. How red is that flag? If he’s hitting on your other friends, or you, or if you saw him out cheating, that is a red flag. If he’s gaslighting or disrespecting your friend, that is a red flag. If he just likes to drink, is a dumb bro, or is kind of a douche canoe, that’s not a red flag. When men get together with “the boys,” even the greatest guys somehow lose their last brain cell. Sometimes men do and say gross things when they’re left alone in groups without women. Forgive them and think about the fact that women can be so much worse.

However, the hardest time to be a wingwoman is when you have to tell your friend that she is the one in the wrong. It’s time we stop biting our tongues when our girlfriend complains that she doesn’t understand what went wrong in her relationship. We know what is wrong: She is acting like a brat, or her expectations are too high, or she is being clingy and annoying. We need to be cautiously honest with our friends and call them out, because we want our friends to call us out on our bullshit, too.

Sloppy Seconds

Keltie Knight and I dated the same guy. Well, I dated him first, and she took my sloppy seconds. We now refer to him as our “mutual ex.” Here are our stories.

I never had boyfriends in high school. While the rest of my cheerleading squad was swapping spit with everyone on the football team, I was chasing after shitty band guys who were too busy swapping spit with different groupies around the country to ever want to actually date me. That was until one fateful day, a month before I turned eighteen, when a cute, anonymous emo boy from Las Vegas commented on my LiveJournal. Because the internet never forgets, I was able to track down the exact day this happened and the exact message that started this whole thing:

This was around the time that my little scene queen star was rising in the weird emo corner of the internet, and kids all around the world were intently following my life under a microscope. I was like Kim Kardashian, if Kim Kardashian wore pounds of black eyeshadow, studded belts, and expressed her feelings through brooding AOL away messages. Back in the day, I replied to pretty much every comment on my LiveJournal, so I said something generic back to his comment and didn’t think much of it. But he was quite determined, and after that initial outreach, he occasionally posted semi-cringey and semi-flirty comments on my entries over the next few months. Oh, and he kept begging me to listen to his band’s demos, but I was too busy smooching his role models to get around to it.

He finally piqued my interest when he rearranged lyrics from a bunch of different bands into his own original composition to express how his heart was feeling. And, boy, did that Third Eye Blind–Counting Crows mash-up really turn me on. We started chatting outside of my journal, and I learned that his band was recording an album with some mutual friends of mine in a band called Fall Out Boy. Okay, so he’s not a total stranger. I’m in.

After a few months of online flirting, we met in person for the first time. And we went from a digital-digital-get-down into a full-blown relationship in no time (I seemed to have a pattern in my youth, I know). We immediately plastered our love all over the internet, and everyone was eating it up. The untouchable “scene queen” was dating the lead guitarist of the “next big thing.” It was a match made in emo heaven, and our fans either loved us or loved to hate us. Regardless of whether the attention was positive or negative, it sure blew things up. Kids all over the world were making fan accounts and “role-playing” us in a fictional online fantasy world, to the point where we almost became exaggerated caricatures of ourselves.

Fans were following our every move, and that’s because we were naïvely blasting our every move on our respective online journals. This dynamic only intensified when the singer of his band started dating another popular scene queen, and we immediately became a powerful foursome. Two best friends dating two best friends—what could go wrong?!

Well, a lot could go wrong. The fall was just about as fast as the rise, and I won’t bore you with the in-between. We dated for LITERALLY THREE MONTHS, but three months feels like three decades when you’re eighteen. If you’ve made it this far in our book, you know that I never slept with him. I don’t think I ever even saw his penis. We definitely never said “I love you,” but it’s safe to say that when we broke up, it crushed my immature heart to its absolute core.

Just like we plastered our relationship all over the internet, we also passive-aggressively plastered our cryptic post-breakup feelings all over the internet. Here’s a fun excerpt I found from an interview he did after we broke up:

Interviewer: What do you think about the fans that have tracked down your past girlfriends and have begun idolizing them and giving each their own cult following via the internet?

Mutual Ex-Boyfriend: It’s disgusting. Why would people idolize someone who doesn’t do anything? And saying you’re a model/photographer with a digital camera and Photoshop does not count as [being] an artist.

WOW, I FEEL PERSONALLY ATTACKED. Oh, how times have changed. Half of the people who are idolized these days “don’t do anything,” and literally all you need to be a photographer is a digital camera and Photoshop. But, man, did that sting back in the day.

I was single for five years after our breakup, but it only took him a few months to find his next adorable blonde love interest.

Enter Keltie Knight.

Mutual Ex and Keltie’s relationship catapulted into internet fame just as fast as ours did. Of course I stalked Keltie, of course I was jealous of Keltie, and of course I secretly hoped Keltie’s relationship with Mutual Ex would crash and burn like ours did. I was young and immature and totally left in the dust. And she was living the exciting, rock-star life I had always dreamed of. Somehow, she was even more of an oversharer than I was, so I knew every little detail of their relationship just by googling her name. In my mind, he had just found a better version of me. She was more outgoing, more bubbly, and more talented than I could ever be. And because of that, I felt insecure, insignificant, and lesser than.

The internet didn’t help. Fans of Mutual Ex’s band were obsessed with their personal lives, so somehow I immediately became the villain, even though I was the one who had been dumped. His fans hated me, but they loved to publicly compare me to his hot new girlfriend. Our looks, careers, personalities, weight, whatever—you name it, and it was used as a weapon to pit us against each other. Before I knew it, I hated this girl who I had never met before. Little did I know, she was a kind, hilarious, and wonderful person who was just as insecure as I was.

Keltie and Mutual Ex’s relationship came and went, and she and I ended up running into each other a few times after that. Thankfully, enough time had passed so that the run-ins weren’t too awkward, and, to our surprise, we got along pretty damn well. We ran in the same circles and became friendly acquaintances, but that would all change when she called me out of the blue one day and asked me to start a podcast. The rest is history. Mutual Ex is the sole reason Keltie and I ever even knew the other existed in the first place. So, thank you, Mutual Ex, for unintentionally changing our life paths forever.

Mutual Ex is now our favorite (not-so-)inside joke, and part of our quirky, dysfunctional bond. Not because either of us truly cares, but more so that I can make fun of Keltie for taking my “sloppy seconds.” Neither of us has feelings attached to the situation, but those superfans are still lurking around the dark corners of the internet, trolling us any chance they get whenever we crack a joke about it. To this day, Keltie and I still both get hate mail and death threats. (We’re both on the edge of our seats, waiting for the “OMG, IT WAS TEN YEARS AGO, GET OVER IT” messages after this book comes out. Look, we’re over it—it’s just funny!)

That was my first real relationship with my first real boyfriend, and even though it only lasted for a measly ninety days, I learned a lot. Things aren’t always as they seem on the outside (or on the internet), and you’re truly doing a disservice to yourself by judging someone you’ve never met before. Last of all, people are assholes.

To conclude, I always pride myself on the fact that I’ve never gone back to an ex before. But that’s a lie. A few years after Mutual Ex and I broke up, I happened to be in Las Vegas for a show, and we happened to fool around one night. I remember that it was around the time he dated Keltie, but I could never actually figure out if he cheated on her with me or not. The only detail of the night I remember was that we were watching the newly released music video for Incubus, “Dig,” so Keltie and I recently did some recon and discovered that he was, in fact, single at the time. So, at the end of everything, I guess I took Keltie’s sloppy thirds.

Sloppier Seconds

There are actually very few things that Jac Vanek and I have in common. She’s a seven on the Enneagram, “the Enthusiast,” and her personality type is described as “spontaneous, versatile, and scattered.” Jac is a crop-top-wearing, day-drinking, game-loving, “don’t worry, it will get done” kind of human, and I am a never-drinking, games-without-purpose-are-dumb, “worry until you finish it” type of person.

The one thing we do share is our mutual love of musician men. We both love a guitar-playing, skinny-jean-wearing, weird-haircut-having, tour-bus-smelling man. We love concerts and being backstage at concerts. We love men who are emotionally unavailable, need saving, and write us poems.

This is probably why we have a mutual ex-boyfriend. At this point in our adult lives, this person has become a weird character in our story. Every time we bring it up and laugh about what complete idiots we were, I try to picture myself with that person and I can’t even remember what his face looks like. Over time, he has become a caricature of a person, and a summation of every terrible choice I made in my twenties.

While Jac was busy on the Warped Tour, actually hanging out with bands, I was a struggling dancer in New York City. I remember booking the audition to be a backup dancer for our mutual ex-boyfriend’s band, and being in Ripley-Grier Studios in New York with the choreographer, watching a VHS tape of his band’s performance and figuring out what we were going to do. The dudes were wearing full-on makeup. I thought to myself, This is such weird shit. I had no idea who they were.

I was a backup dancer at MTV’s Video Music Awards for the band, and I ended up meeting Mutual Ex, dating him, living with him, crying over him, and eventually being pathetic enough to write an entire section of a book about finding myself again after him. There is this really weird thing that goes along with trickle-down fame. When you run in the circle of someone who has “made it,” you start to feel like you’ve made it, too. Only, when the fame, and success, and money, and lifestyle are not really yours to hold, when it ends, you’ve gotta do some serious soul-searching. For me, that soul-searching led to therapy and the start of a second phase of my life, in which I really invested in myself and worked hard to understand that I was deserving of love and success on my own terms. Once I truly started investing in my own happiness, my entire life flourished.

I’ve since closed the goddamn door, literally, on that section of my life, and I’ve married a rocker turned businessman (who, by the way, still wears skinny jeans and takes me backstage at concerts—just in a different way). Nonetheless, it was a really meaningful series of events, and I think that’s why it’s so easy to bring up and talk about. I’m not sure how much the version of him I invented in my head actually existed. I really didn’t know what kind of person I wanted to be, what I wanted out of my life, what I needed in a relationship, and, to be honest—I didn’t think I deserved much.

I know that I certainly did not deserve the amount of hate I received on the newly birthed internet during this time. There was a bizarre corner of the internet that was devoted to bands and their girlfriends. I only knew of Jac because we were pitted against each other regularly. I would see her “modeling pictures” and cool, scene-girl hair, and I would have that comparison be the thief of my own self-worth. She was the ultimate cool girl, and I was and still am an oddball loner who would rather spend time with a book than with a human. We were labeled instant enemies for no real reason, and to be honest, there were times when I thought of this woman I had never even met with disdain. I wasn’t a fully formed human yet, and I tended to believe all the one-sided bad things that Mutual Ex would say about her. It’s such an easy narrative to pit an ex against a new gal, and I still to this day feel bad about the time I passive-aggressively posted SCENE QUEEN < DANCING QUEEN on my Myspace page. Sorry, Jac.

Here is what I do know. The internet is a cruel place for Emo Jac and Dancer Keltie and their mutual ex-boyfriend. The photos, the blogs, the passive-aggressive tweets, and the overall immaturity of the entire era will haunt me forever. But dating Mutual Ex, and finding out who Jac was, eventually led me to realize that I did not hate this girl—in fact, I thought she was pretty dang cool. I went on to silently stalk and admire her for years afterward, which led me to forcing her into my life.

I wanted to work with her, so I texted her randomly one day. Jac, being the enthusiast that she is, said, “Yes, sure!” And it has been one of the most fulfilling things I’ve ever done. LadyGang wouldn’t be the same without Jacquelene Vanek. I have never met anyone who can literally have no idea what is going on in the world but also know exactly where the smush-face dog convention is happening on Friday. She’s a special human. So, while our mutual ex-boyfriend might not have been the greatest actual boyfriend to either of us, he brought us together, and I do want to thank him for having such incredible, flawless, perfect taste in women.