Girls Recap: Acting Your Age Is One Thing; Not Acting Like A Dick Is Another

This is a recap of the most recent episode of Girls. Spoiler alert.

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Here’s a theory for you: nobody has ever introduced Hannah to the concept of boundaries before.

Seriously, think about it. The Queen of TMI has turned her fearless oversharing into a career asset by using it in her writing; she’s spent most of her young adult life filing away her life experiences so she can write about them, so she’s used to thinking of the details of her life as both interesting and for public consumption. Most of her friends (Jessa, Elijah and Shosh, at least) are just as prone to it as she is, so she’s usually surrounded by people with whom she shares every detail anyway.

She’s quit or lost several jobs and one MFA program in frustration or embarrassment after bumping up against the unspoken rules of grown-up work environments, none of them really the kind where someone will sit you down quietly and explain something fairly basic about social interaction.

But trust a teacher to see when a young person needs a little gentle guidance. All blessings and good things be upon Principal Toby, who doesn’t treat Hannah as a misbehaving teenager or as a full-grown adult who’s been knowingly inappropriate with the students – she is neither of these. She’s smart, passionate, well-intentioned, and just starting out as a teacher, and like a good many people in the early stages of working life, still needs to work out how much of her personality she’s supposed to tamp down in order to be “professional”.

Even though Hannah immediately prods at the boundary Principal Toby sets down (if complimenting your coworker’s choice of trouser is over the line, I have an appointment with HR), she also (almost) immediately takes the idea to heart and puts it into practice. Both her parents (and Elijah) are dealing with the changes in the Horvaths’ lives by talking a lot about the mechanics of Tad being gay – the dry-humping, the dick-sucking, the ass-pounding, which gay stereotype he is – and the fact is that just because your father is a (newly) proud gay man and you’re being totally supportive and that also perfectly aligns with how liberal you are, that doesn’t magically make you more comfortable with the mental image of your dad with a mouthful of schlong. So she sets some boundaries.

(And let’s also note that in the first season, Hannah walked in on her parents having honest-to-goodness P-in-V so-athletic-there-were-actual-injuries sex, and handled the whole thing with real maturity and aplomb; her attitude here isn’t any more indicative of juvenile my-parents-don’t-have-genitals squeamishness.)

But if being able to corral your own personal stuff to stop it spilling constantly into your life and relationships is a grownup skill, so is learning to deal with the spillage from other people’s poor boundary-setting. Remember when Adam and Hannah’s relationship in the first season seemed unconventional? Adam seems like Walt Cleaver compared to Ace and MEH, whose commitment to emotional honesty with everyone is matched only by their apparent aversion to emotional commitment with Adam and Jessa.

Their brand of honesty is not unlike those comment-section dudebros who say dickish or racist or straight-up wrong things and are then all “Just being honest!!1! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯” when they’re called out. This technique, in theory, gives jerks an out for being jerks by holding their “honest” jerkiness up as the opposite of lying, because lying is objectively bad, right?

But this line of thinking is disingenuous at best, because it assumes it’s a binary decision (and ignores the whole thing with society where sometimes we don’t tell the truth because it’s not actually necessary 100% of the time, particularly when it can hurt people’s feelings). There’s a third option in this scenario, which is not saying anything at all if your other two choices are being a jerk and being a liar.

MEH’s third option is to choose nobody, herself, to be alone, when faced with a choice between Ace and Adam. Of course, there are more than three options in this situation. One of them is, “Don’t ask your ex and his new girlfriend to hang around in your love nest while your new boyfriend fries them up some sausages!” Another is, “If your ex is openly talking about wanting you back in front of both of your respective current partners, maybe cut the evening short and have a mature discussion in private with your fella about your future as a couple so everyone gets to retain a little dignity.”

But Ace and MEH are artists, and they fancy themselves free-thinking bohemians, unbound by the shackles of traditional monogamous relationship dynamics! “We’re all grownups here” has been their motto when other characters bring up the potential awkwardness of mixing with their current and former lovers in social settings – as though grownups don’t have feelings, or something.

They don’t have all Adam and Jessa’s puritan hangups about sex, man! Letting the personal feelings of others who don’t completely subscribe to your worldview get in the way of what YOU want is for chumps! MEH’s “I choose me!” epiphany is, in her mind, the mature option, the one that’s best for her; in reality, she’s just effectively dumped her boyfriend because an ex she doesn’t even want to be with suggested they get back together.

Now remember that half this season’s plot has been driven by Jessa’s scheme to get Ace into bed. At the beginning of this episode, she’s obviously succeeded and fun is being had by all. (The Tiffany exchange was cute, and while I was initially worried they might have been trying to do some insufferable pseudo-tantric breathing thing, they weren’t, so that was also fine.)

By the end, Ace has tanked his relationship with Jessa, MEH’s relationship with Adam, and his own get-back-with-MEH scheme. Adam’s been questioning his relationship a bit since the abortion revelation, and a lot since Jessa told him of her plans. Now, like a smaller-scale version of Tad and Loreen’s blown-apart marriage, Adam’s realised that his relationship is built on an essentially false assumption: that both parties have been on the same page about it this whole time.

The script for ‘Daddy Issues’, while still funny, is one of the weaker ones this season, hitting the episode’s themes way too hard and too bluntly. Contrasting a scene where Hannah’s father tells her she’s still a child (seriously, though, who leaves the house without their wallet after age 13?) with one almost immediately after where Hannah’s male boss-with-paternal-undertones informs her she’s actually an adult is like having her wear a T-shirt that reads I AM IN AN AWKWARD LIFE STAGE BETWEEN ADOLESCENCE AND ADULTHOOD WHERE I AM BOTH AND NEITHER AT ONCE AND I’M GETTING SOME REALLY MIXED FEEDBACK FROM THE WORLD AT LARGE ON THIS MATTER SO I’M JUST GOING TO TRY AND GET AS MUCH FREE FOOD AS POSSIBLE WHILE I CAN.

On the Marnie-Ray-Desi triangle of doom to which we’ll apparently be subjected next season, I will say only this: I really, really hope it involves Ray heroically punching Desi in the nose. (And possibly, long takes of Desi slowly realising things and not liking them.) Shosh is clearly born to be a politician’s wife and, after that, a better politician than her politician husband – don’t fight it.

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Girls airs on Showcase at 7.30pm Mondays, with a re-run at 9.35pm each Thursday.

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Caitlin Welsh is a freelance writer who tweets from @caitlin_welsh. Read her Girls recaps here.