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How To Deal With A Breakup As Told By Our Favorite Movie And TV Characters

This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at U Iowa chapter.

Breakups. We all go through them at one point or another. Maybe they’re for the best, maybe they’re painful as hell. Regardless, we all have different ways of coping. Following are a few ways our favorite TV and movie characters have learned to handle breakups.

Viola Hastings in She’s the Man

 

Transfer schools and pretend to be your brother and win you a Channing Tatum.

Pam Beesly in The Office

Move on with a lankier and nerdier, but much more handsome goof at your workplace who gives you a teapot filled with inside jokes and pranks a co-worker just to make you laugh.

Gabriella Montez in High School Musical 2

Give that Sharpay-lover his necklace back and sing a dramatic song on a bridge until your mom shows up at the perfect time to pick you up in her minivan. 

Jess Day in New Girl

Find some dope new roomies and proceed to sob and sing along to Dirty Dancing on a loop in their living room. 

Cal in Crazy, Stupid, Love

Find Ryan Gosling in a bar and have him teach you how to dress yourself and talk to women.

Ross and Rachel in FRIENDS

Never, I repeat NEVER, claim you were on a break. 

Amanda in The Holiday

Swap your home with someone across the pond and date her brother who allows you to cry again and looks fine as hell in glasses.

Lorelai Gilmore in Gilmore Girls

“Get back in your pajamas, go to bed and eat nothing but gallons of ice cream and tons of pizza.” Because, duh.

Heather, Beth, and Carrie in John Tucker Must Die

Recruit the new girl to take down his cheating ass and humiliate him by giving him estrogen supplements and coercing him into wearing women’s underwear.

Noah in The Notebook

Wait for her for years and build her dream house until you reunite again and have the most romantic kiss of your life.

Elle Woods in Legally Blonde

Get into Harvard Law and show him everything he’s missing.

If you learn anything from this list, it’s that you should probably not handle a breakup in any of these ways unless it involves eating and crying to these TV shows and movies (unless you’re Elle Woods, the queen of all breakups), but you already knew that. I hope things get better for you, girlfriend. You are a gem and deserve to be happy.

Paige Netzel is a senior at the University of Iowa, studying English and Creative Writing with a Cinema minor. Coffee, creating playlists, and gratitude are essential to keeping her going. Check her out on Twitter for some hecka funny tweets or on Spotify for those dope playlists.
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