Why the woman in ‘Hotline Bling’ is my 2015 hero

Disclaimer: This may automatically get “Hotline Bling” stuck in your head forever and for that…I’m not sorry. It’s been stuck in mine for weeks.

We’ve all been there in some capacity. You fall for a dude, and things fall apart because of timing. Sometimes this means he’s not over his ex, sometimes he’s too into our “swipe left” culture, and sometimes he’s Drake and like…tours a lot and stuff. Then you spend maybe months wondering what he’s thinking, and here comes Drake with his point of view of this exact scenario and it’s, well, it’s not one I agree with.

Think about “Hotline Bling” as a kind of play: It’s about an ego-bruised dude (not Drake IRL necessarily, more like a character he’s playing) who truly expected his girl to sit around and wait for him, literally from inside her house, calling him late at night from time to time for late night hook-ups. When you think about it that way, isn’t the hero of this play definitely the girl? Here’s what she does: she starts going out more with her friends, moves on, and stops calling up her one-time hook-up on the reg. That’s all stuff that you would tell your best friend to do, instead of hanging by the telephone, right? Maybe she occasionally slips up and calls him on his cell phone (as opposed to, I guess, a house phone) after a few glasses of champagne. But that’s okay. Emotional relapse can be a part of recovery.

Let’s look at it from his point of view. Maybe for a while, she stayed home pining for him. Maybe read some books she had been meaning to read, baked cookies with her mom, Taylor Swifted it up. Then, she started noticing his very active social media life. The Instagrams of after-parties, flirts with Twitter babes, maybe a TMZ post or two, Lil Wayne’s Snapchat stories…and she started to get bored. So she went out and bought a badass dress, some heels. She called that girl from work who is always inviting her to happy hour. She started to feel like she was getting her self back. She started having fun. She started thinking of him a little less.

There’s the complaint that she’s hangin’ with some girls I’ve never seen before. But after a break-up, that’s what you do. You find new friends, or maybe mix up old friends with a new squad. She’s running out of pages on her passport because she’s flying all over the place. I mean, she sounds like she’s pretty much killing it.

When Drake sings, You should just be yourself, right now you’re someone else, I would like to argue that he probably never knew her. Our selves aren’t these fixed points that we’re meant never to stray from. They’re always changing. We’re always adding on new things and refining parts of ourselves. There’s a core part of you that’s you no matter what you do. You want to be true to it, but that doesn’t mean you can’t try new things or change the way you approach life. In fact, you should.

I think we could all learn a little from this babe’s “screw this, I’m moving on” attitude. The thing is, she might call him from time to time late at night, but he’s the one answering. She’s the real hero of the story. I promise.