Any person in college who drinks (read: everyone) knows that for a night to be considered a “great night," the pregame also needs to be great. Sure, the club could be bumping or the house party might be insane, but without a good start to the night, there’s no way to get into the groove of things. I mean, how else will you convince yourself that the cover price and waiting 25 minutes for a drink is worth it? I recently went on a sorority formal, and while at the pregame, I noticed a few things about the females in the room I’ve never noticed before; a girl at a pregame doesn’t act like a regular girl. And by that, I mean a regular girl cares about everything, while a girl at a pregame couldn’t care less.

I will never fully understand girls, but what I do know is that they just need to chill out sometimes. Would I ever willingly tell a girl that she needs to calm down? Hell no, that’s how guys get slapped, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. Girls may differ from guys by the things they let worry them, but, like guys, girls just need a chance to wind down. And that chance is the pregame.

The pregame is the event before going out. Going out is where all of the action happens. The pregame, on the other hand, is the hype before.

Girls are more likely to act like themselves at a pregame because it’s their last chance to be who they are before showing up to the bar, where they are observed under a microscope. At a bar, the girl has to keep her guard up, because she faces a sea of endless dudes hitting on her, while also, weirdly enough, competing for the attention of these guys with every girl in the room. But that’s the game and the burden of being a party girl. The pregame girl has no burden.

At a pregame, a girl can drink an entire bottle of champagne herself without having to flirt with some dirt bag with bottle service. She can openly say why she hates that one girl in chapter because that girl isn’t at the pregame and she won’t be seeing her until later tonight—she can just be fake around her then. At the pregame, she can steal the aux cord listen to the same Zayn song three times without having to ask the DJ for a request. The pregame girl is being her

happy, normal self who can even Instagram stalk the guy she’s talking to without worrying about liking an old picture of his because, right now, she’s relatively sober and isn’t going to drunk text him five times in a row. The girl at the club, on the other hand, probably will.