A Lesson From ‘Girls’: Be More Like Cher And Live Your Fucking Truth

This is being filed later than usual because I keep drifting over to a browser tab that says ‘Old Loves‘. I can hear Jessa’s voice in my head berating me (“You used to have interesting ideas and now all you do is browse the internet!”) but I’d forgotten how mesmerising it is to scroll through the photos of happy, beautiful people who were once in love but aren’t any more.

You look for clues of what’s to come; signs that they were actually perfect together and somhow fucked it up, little wild sparks in their gaze that speak to a kind of fleeting magic few people can hope to actually conjure at all, let alone maintain long-term. Some faces are familiar as your own ex-lovers’; some pairings are nostalgic pangs from your younger years, and some are almost surreal (Lyla Garrity and Turkleton WHAT). They look happy and normal, and it’s hard not to think, sadly, with all the confidence of hindsight and the pretence that you know anything about their lives: You poor saps. You had no idea.

But it’s reassuring, as well, especially when the photos encompass a decade or more of the ups and down of one person’s relationships (and personal style) over a couple of consecutive posts. It’s a reminder that even the very beautiful, famous and rich have personal problems both embarrassing and heart-crushing; that they, like us, make mistakes, learn from them and change as people. Figuratively speaking, we all have grainy photos of our younger selves in crumpled satin camisole tops and brown lipstick, proudly clutching the hand of a greasy, beaming douche who we thought we’d be with forever. We look back at those people and think: Oh, honey. It gets better (and worse, for a bit). You have no idea.

We don’t know what’s coming, and that uncertainty can make us stick with the familiar when we really ought to cut our losses. And that’s where we come to Marnie. In all her obliviously sad moments in ‘Old Loves’ this week — the way she comes home dreamily happy to her idiot husband and says her mum “got back with her boyfriend, so she didn’t need me any more”, the way she shapes herself to and blames herself for Desi’s toddler feelings and man-tantrums, the way she stands up for herself and then backpedals AGAIN — her advice to Hannah is the saddest.

“Don’t break up with Fran,” she says. “Otherwise you’re going to have to start over again with somebody new. People who work on things stay together. Otherwise you’re going to end up alone. Like Cher.”

Starting anew after spending precious energy and time building something with someone, building intimacy and shibboleths and knowledge of one another, is exhausting, and what’s more, it makes the spent time and energy feel like a waste. But that is not a reason not to do something. That’s the kind of thinking that makes people finish meals or degrees or poker games or arguments they don’t want to or can’t afford to. It’s called the sunk cost fallacy, and it does not apply in relationships, or when you want to make a drastic career change in your 40s, or when that new moisturiser is clearly responsible for the rash on your face but it was $60 and you’re too embarrassed to admit you spent that much on something that makes you look like Barnaby Joyce on a fun run.

It also does not apply if your boyfriend of less than a year, with whom you have fundamental differences of opinion when it comes to your shared field of employment, who rolls his eyes at you literally every time you interact, who you describe to a friend as “someone who hates me”, who you sit with your back to at home, who dismisses your insecurities about your body, who calls you “buddy”, is still seen as A Catch by your friends because he’s a nice teacher instead of an insane, bow-legged art-carpenter/actor. 

You don’t have to stay with someone because they tick certain Boyfriend Boxes, Hannah! If you’re not happy, you can leave! Yes, couples who Work On Things often stay together and, when the circumstances are right, that can be great. But that doesn’t always mean that they should, or that they’re happy, or that they don’t have regrets, or that they’ve succeeded. We’re taught to value persistence and stick-to-itiveness over “being a quitter”, but it’s genuinely okay, most of the time, to stop doing something if it isn’t working for you anymore, no matter how humiliating or expensive or initially time-consuming it is.

This is also why it’s interesting to watch Jessa give up on her friendship with Hannah. Jessa’s shown an (arguably) admirable ability to just say “fuck it” and do what she wants — it’s been essentially her defining character trait over the course of the series. Her nomadic earlier life taught her to value experiences over possessions, as they are much easier to carry with you, and she often treated people the same way she did things: leaving them behind when she moved on to the next.

Last season she was angry at Hannah for dragging her back to New York because Hannah “needed” her and then fucked off to Iowa, which showed in her shitty attitude and her behaviour to Adam (which, with her admission in this episode, takes on a new edge). As Hannah notes, Jessa’s brand of affectionate meanness has developed a blunter quality, even as her actual behaviour as a human has improved. She’s lost most of her patience with Hannah and Marnie, and developed a focus on her studies and her sobriety. She has a much firmer grasp of what she actually wants.

Sleeping with Adam is a big step not just because they’re definitely at the beginning of something, but also because it’s clear she’s given up on maintaining whatever she still had with Hannah. While it is, to a degree, more forgivable to sleep with your close friend’s significant ex when there are non-pants feelings involved, you are still sleeping with your friend’s significant ex. Even after she interrupted your study time, jokingly threatened to cut your hair off, couldn’t pay for her artisanal rice pudding, and quite seriously and viciously called you a cunt, she’s just smearing the bridge with pitch and stuffing the gaps with newspaper. When you start something with their ex without their express and mostly-genuine blessing, you’re the one putting the torch to it. (Although Hannah’s little snap at the end there really was mean as shit, so she kind of handed Jessa the torch, I guess? Poor Hannah does have a lot going on with Fran and her parents and everything, but man, that was uncharacteristically, calculatedly nasty.

I never exactly got why Hannah and Jessa were so close in the first place, except for the mutual lack of filter and the fact that 19-year-old Oberlin freshman Hannah would have probably been terribly impressed by her. Say it with me, kids: if a relationship isn’t making you happy, you don’t have to keep investing energy in it.

Interestingly, though Adam and Jessa continue to be adorable, their first bits-actually-touching encounter also reminds us that just because there’s been a lot of buildup to the main event and you are both sexy and you like each other as people, doesn’t mean the sex will automatically be spectacular. As the also-adorable Elijah and Dill (or as I’m calling them, PickleJah) show us, sex is essentially kinda weird and awkward even when it’s good.

Anyway, Cher might be single now, I don’t know, but she banged an Allman Brother AND Val Kilmer in his golden prime. She is living her fucking truth, and she’s doing it in all-caps. Imagine if that sort of badassery could be in your future. What — and who — would you give up on?

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Girls airs on Showcase at 7.30pm Tuesday nights.

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