1. Talking sh*t

Girls love talking sh*t when they’re together. We can’t do it with guys because it comes off as mostly insane, incredibly insecure, and is also boring because guys haven’t refined this skill in the way that girls have. You’d never know how many things could be wrong with a person until you bring 5 girlfriends and 15 vodka sodas together. You know what? Your nail beds DO suck.

There’s nothing quite like a good sh*t talking session when you haven’t seen your best friends… so go ahead and get it all out. Your boyfriend doesn’t want to hear about it tomorrow.

2. Compliments

“You look SOO skinny”

“Where did you get that top?”

“You need to teach me how to wear liquid liner”

We love each other. It’s hard to hide after round three and we don’t really give a sh*t what the creeps at the bar think about it. If I’m juicing for two days and then go out with my girlfriends and they DON’T tell me how skinny I look, it’s like I never juiced at all.

3. Ex-Talk

Whether you’re sitting at a table or standing at the bar, it’s bound to come out. Ex-talk is inappropriate in basically every other setting BESIDES sitting at a table with four other people that know him and hate him just as much as you do. Talk about his 19-year-old girlfriend who sucks. And about how he texted you when he was drunk three weeks ago and you didn’t respond – shots for everyone!

Oh, and did you block him on Facebook? Look at that… perfect timing for another round of vodka sodas and…

4. Facebook Stalking

When you’re on a date, you pull out your phone because you’re bored as sh*t and you do it mentally. On girls’ night, it couldn’t be more different. There are few things more satisfying than a really good Facebook rant on girls night. Is someone’s status bugging you? Is the hot guy you went to high school with now dating someone and you can’t quite figure out what’s wrong with her face? Did your boyfriends ex gain ten pounds?

It’s time for your girlfriends to help you out. Scroll through those photos. Make fun of those hashtags. Analyze the comments. This is what friendship is all about.

4. “Let’s dance”

Are you done talking analyzing each other’s personal lives and those of the people that you hate? Guess. What. It’s time to make the DJ your bff and dance! If you hear any of the following exclamations, you can be relatively certain that you’ve reached this portion of the night.

“Seriously? You don’t have ANY MORE Beyoncé songs?”

“Let’s do a 90s throwback! LFO, anyone?!”

“No, I actually do know how to dougie…excuse me, DJ!?”

“I don’t care what anyone says … Taylor Swift is the QUEEN”

5.  Relationship Envy

The DJ will only play ‘Single Ladies,’ ‘Rude Boy,’ and ‘22’ so many times before realizing that none of you are going to sleep with him. Time to sit down again. That’s when you hear the first mumble of “I just wish I had a boyfriend!”

If you are out for drinks with four friends, chances are that one or two of you are in a relationship. At this point, you’ve probably been given at least 2 rounds of free shots, (pretty sure “jolly ranchers” don’t count as shots but whatever) also giving everyone the opportunity to vent their jealousy of those that are in relationships. Just let it out. After a year or so, they don’t even really know how to respond because they have just as many problems as you do. I fold my boyfriend’s laundry and sometimes it sits out on the table ready to be put away for like TEN DAYS AT A TIME. It drives me absolutely insane. But this is not the time to bring that up. For those of you that are coupled up, this is your perfect time to ask…

6. “So who’s on Tinder anyway?”

There’s nothing I love more than a good online dating story. Or a good Tinder message history. I LOVE looking at Tinder on my friends phones. It is an amazing concept to me. I’m convinced that no one actually uses it for relationships or even to actually meet people in real life. I’m pretty sure girls just use it to talk sh*t about how desperate guys are and receive validation through half-hearted wholly-douchey messages like “sup sexy lady?! I’d love to take you for a ride in my BMW this weekend…” (That’s real.)

For this reason, I’ve petitioned my boyfriend to let me have Tinder for entertainment purposes. So far, I’m still waiting to hear back.

7. Remember when…

Getting more than two of your friends together at any given time is harder than finding a star to agree to appear in Fifty Shades of Grey. For some reason, it’s a struggle. Even when you’re in the same city, you all have jobs and lives moving in different directions, so making time for each other is difficult. When you do all get together, you’ll spend half the time reminiscing about all of the ridiculous sh*t you used to get away with before you had jobs, limited budgets and responsibilities.

Remember five years ago … when you just had to yell across the room to your best friends bed to tell here how badly you needed a greasy breakfast sandwich? My best friend from college and I talk about our freshman year dorm room all of the time. It was a sh*thole and you couldn’t pay me enough to spend another night there … but talking about it makes me feel almost as good as watching Anne Hathaway trip at a movie premiere. No, this hasn’t happened yet. But I’m holding out hope waiting for it.

I miss that. Your friends do, too.

8. Text Analysis

Unless one of your girlfriends has just gotten out of a relationship, chances are that your night won’t revolve around meeting boys. Maybe it’s just that my friends are extra awesome, but even when I was single, catching up with them ranks like a billion times higher than chatting up an arrogant stranger who’s 5 shots of fireball into his night and thinks that guys can wear leather jackets. My single friends know all too well how that story will end for them.

But when one of my single friends tells me about some guy she met at a work happy hour from a friend-of-a-friend and how he may-or-may-not-be-her-soul-mate-but-based-on-his-texts-definitely-is, I love a good text analysis section.

At this point, we’re all seasoned experts. Emoticons in an un-ironic way? Give me a break. Ellipsis at the end of a sentence? Not looking for a relationship. Waiting more than 15 minutes to respond? Are you kidding me? This may not be bbm, but I know you’ve read my text. Someone please tell me if there is a way to turn text message analysis into a career, because I need to sign up for it like yesterday.

9. Celebrity Gossip

If I could change one thing about my boyfriend, I would make him care more about celebrities. He makes me feel insane when I tell him that he can’t talk through TMZ because I want to hear specifically what Kendall Jenner said to the Paparazzi at fashion week. When my girlfriends and I get together, there is an embarrassingly large portion of our night devoted to discussing whether we would wear a pants suit to legally wed George Clooney (no), if Jimmy Kimmel is hot (kind of), and how amazing it is that Seth Cohen and Blair Waldorf are married (very).

10. #Girlpower

Unless it ends in someone throwing up and crying … which seems to happen less and less ever since I turned 20, every night spent with my girlfriends ends pretty much the same way. And it’s awesome. We all love the sh*t out of each other. We should see each other more often. It’s been too long. We need to find time to get away from work. We need to call more and text less. Oh, and we should all feel great about ourselves because even if we’re only sort of, kind of where we thought we’d be at this age, right now there’s nowhere else we’d rather be and no one else we’d rather spend our time with. Here’s where the over-enthusiastic hugs and awkward glances from strangers come in.

Now can someone ask the DJ to play Taylor Swift one more time?