These Are The Prom Struggles Every Girl Will Never Forget

Prom was actually the worst and these things still give me mass anxiety.

1. Finding a date. Should you ask someone? Should you wait for someone to ask you? What if no one asks you? What if the person you ask says no? And if you couldn’t find a date, you had to convince yourself that nobody wanted to ask you because they were wayyyyy too intimidated by your good looks.

2. Getting a badass dress that no one else will have. And convincing your parents to buy it for you. I will never forget this pink and black dress I wanted from Cache that my mom refused to buy for me. At least the place I ended up getting my senior prom dress from had a database where they wrote down my dress and my high school so no one else going to my prom would be able to get the same dress. Fashion crisis averted, yall.

3. Wondering if you should pay for your ticket, if your date should pay for your ticket, or if you should pay for your date’s ticket. Or… whose parents should pay for your ticket because if we’re being serious here, the little money we did have at this point needed to be saved for AFTER-PROM. Smirnoff Ice anyone?

4. Figuring out who you’re going to take pictures with and then who’s house you’re going to take these pictures at. This shit put the END in friendship. You wanted to take pictures with everyone, but you couldn’t get everyone at the same house. And if you wanted it be at your house, you better have had suburban swag with lots of land and maybe an in-ground pool with maybe a waterfall.

5. Figuring out the limo. Even if you took before prom pictures with the world and a half, you couldn’t fit everyone in one limo, so you had to somehow decide who would be in each one. Limos, btw, were expensive and everyone had to split it. The struggle was REAL.

6. Finalizing a plan for after-prom. If you were lucky, a friends’ parents let everyone crash in their basement, but chances are you either had to limit the amount of people invited to said basement OR you had to bank on someones’ parents not being home. If neither was the case, you were basically screwed AKA doomed to sit in the McDonalds parking lot. #DollarMenu

7. Spray tanning. Never have I ever been so orange, right?

8. Trying to get out of school early to get your hair did. Why wasn’t school just, like, closed for the day? Did administration not realize that we had to get our HAIR DONE?!

9. Acne. It always seemed to pop up right before major events that involved picture taking such as prom. I would say “being a teenager was hard” but this still happens now, so UGH.

10. Wearing heels. Yeah… no.

11. Your parents meeting your date, you meeting your date’s parents, and of course all the parents meeting all the parents. These are things we wait to make happen now, but back then it was a free for all. So awkward.

12. Not knowing where to put your hands during the slow dances. Because hand placement was awkward no matter what you tried.

13. The awkwardness of the whole thing that is Prom Court. Whether your classmates chose or the teachers chose, it was just AWKWARD. Actually, anything involving a crown is awkward.

14. Wanting to leave prom ASAP because you were sober and you wanted to get the after-party started ASAP. After-prom was basically more important than prom. Mostly because prom is a sober wedding and who the FUCK would want to go to a sober wedding?

15. The stomach pain that follows the extreme consumption of Smirnoff Ice, the queen of all things acidic. Years later, the fear of Smirnoff Ice hangovers still lives on…

Oh the good ol’ days.