Is Girl Code Dead? | Vogue

Not long ago, I threw a going-away party before moving to Los Angeles. It was a dimly lit, wine-soaked send-off in the basement of a Croatian restaurant on Lower East Side. By hour three, I had consumed one too many glasses of orange wine and somehow ended the night without my top. It felt like an appropriate farewell to New York: chaotic and overly intimate in that particular downtown way.

I invited an ex-lover—or rather, someone who was my ex in every way except by official title. I wasn’t clinging to anything unresolved. I was in a happy relationship, and it felt adult, even generous, to offer a friendly goodbye to someone who had once been part of my life.

The next day, he texted me: Would it be okay if I asked out Marie?

The phrasing was considerate. The sentiment, less so.

Fast-forward a few months, and they’re now dating. My best friend and my ex.

At first, I tried to think of it anthropologically: How fascinating, this modern entanglement. But in reality, it has changed our friendship in ways that I could have never anticipated.

The second time this happened, I had just finished scuba diving in Hawaii. I emerged from the water—less Baywatch, more Loch Ness Monster—and checked my phone with sopping fingers. A text from another close friend: Would you care if… You can guess the rest.

She wanted to hook up with someone I had dated semi-seriously the year before. “It’s not that deep,” she assured me. Of course, it already was. As it turns out, they’d been seeing each other in secret for weeks. She’d just been too scared to tell me.

At first, I thought: Am I cursed? Is there something about me that makes people think I’m chill with this? Have I given off some kind of cool-girl, boundary-less energy that screams, “Sure, take my exes, take my leftovers, take my toothbrush while you’re at it”?