Last week, one of my best friends got dumped by her boyfriend. It was awful. When he went home for Thanksgiving they were a couple. A week and a half later, when he returned, he was pretty much engaged to another woman. I felt terrible for her. But if I’m being honest, I couldn’t be happier for myself!

Let’s face it, single girls LOOOOVE when their friends break up with their boyfriends. Don’t get me wrong, boyfriends are cool, but they tend to get in the way. I have one friend whose boyfriend I love, yet every time she invites me to dinner, I show up fully prepared to spend the evening talking shit about him (which is pretty much what all girls do when their significant others aren’t around) and there he is! They spend the evening trying to figure out a way to eat without letting go of each other’s hands, while I sit there trying to stick to safe conversations, like how work is going. I don’t care how work is going, I want to hear about how crappy your relationship is!

Then there’s when boyfriends turn into husbands. Even worse. Over the past two years, two of my friends got married and now one of them is leaving me forever to move half-way across the country and the other one is moving upstate to have eight million babies. My friends are dropping like flies, so when Carmen told me a couple of days ago that her man jumped ship and she wouldn’t be going to Texas like originally planned, I comforted her for a couple of hours and then jumped for joy over all the fun I’m going to have! Here’s why:

I have a bestie again!

“But she was your bestie before!” you might say. No! Before, her boyfriend was her best friend. And while I’m on the subject, am I the only one who finds it annoying when couples use this term for one another? Best friends tell each other absolutely everything and when mine confesses to me that she’s banging all of her co-workers, I don’t tell her she has a small dick and then throw my hairdryer at her. That behavior I save for my BOY-friend. See the difference? But anyway, now that Carmen no longer has her “best friend” I’ve moved up a notch.

Example: When my best friend Vanna got dumped on Superbowl Sunday a number of years ago, it was great! This was a girl I had been inseparable with for close to twenty years but when we had boyfriends, we were lucky if we saw one another once a month. When we both broke up with our guys at nearly at the same time, we were able to connect in a way that we hadn’t since we were much younger. Neither one of us had anything better to do, so we were up each other’s asses constantly. You know that friend you have who you text back and forth with, like thirty times a day? Usually saying nothing at all like “I’m bored.” or “What should I watch?” That was us again, and I loved it. That just doesn’t happen when you have a boyfriend, because you’re doing that with your boyfriend.

This is totally going to get me out of the house!

My girlfriend’s relationships have been murder on my social life. Their situations have a tendency to keep them locked away from the world, which subsequently leaves me to suffer the same. I’m sorry, but I’m just not going to get dressed up like Richard Simmons and go to 80s night all by myself. But now my weekends are set! Carmen’s gruesome split means I don’t have to spend Friday nights deciding if the candles I light while I’m knitting should give off a mellow scent to lull me to sleep or a more energetic aroma, given I decide to go hard and craft til eleven p.m.

Instead, I’m going to be going to concerts and getting silly drunk and acting like a complete spazz on a more regular basis. I’ve seen more of Carmen this last week than I have in a number of months and we’re having a blast. Of course she’s upset, who wouldn’t be? But that’s not going to stop me from being excited about all of our upcoming endeavors. It’s Saturday night and we’re actually going to dinner! Who does that? Now compare it to what I spent last Saturday night doing when Carmen still had a boyfriend:

This took me forty-five minutes! I spent twenty-five shooting us from different angles and then another twenty putting this photo through various filters and deciding on whether the bokeh lights should be hearts or stars. So yeah, you’re breaking up with your boyfriend? I’m all for it.

And just to be clear, if it sounds like I’m being slightly insensitive during my girl’s time of need, this is her:

I think she’ll be OK.

While I agree that break ups suck, the silver lining to losing someone you love, is you often recover a lot of the people you lost. So Carmen, I want to thank you for doing me a solid here. I’m really looking forward to all the time we get to spend together in the future. And to all of my other friends who are in relationships, if things start going sour, fret not, I’m always here waiting to pick up where we left off.

Unless I have a boyfriend. In that case, in the famous words of Eric Cartman: