Girl Code, Interrupted 

You graduate middle school with two basic social codes: Hammurabi’s Code and girl code. At thirteen, “an eye for an eye” carries as much weight as “sisters before misters.” So when the internet discovered that Summer House’s Amanda Batula is now dating West Wilson—the ex-boyfriend of her best friend Ciara Miller—the response was resoundingly unanimous: boo. 

The closest thing straight people have to a coming-out post is the Instagram Story apology. Following the duo’s traitorous black-screen-white-text reveal, the Bravoverse’s relevancy skyrocketed as viewers—from Jon Hamm to Zohran Mamdani to Rihanna—weighed in on the betrayal of Woman choosing Man over Friend. West is receiving a deserved portion of public shame, but there’s a specific ire directed towards Amanda for her cardinal sin: breaking girl code. Boys will be boys; Amanda has an eye to answer for. 

The buzz around this is Andy Cohen’s wet dream, as fans have been desperately sleuthing across Reddit megathreads and past seasons for answers to their indignant cry: how could she! But we can’t talk about violating girl code without talking about the system that rewards women for choosing romance over friendship. 

Betrayals like this are deeply hurtful. But the desecration of girl code is what the romance myth—the idea battered into us that there is one person who will make our life complete—enables. Friends are just a footnote to the happily ever after. 

Multiple billion-dollar industries are built on reinforcing this myth. From womb to tomb, we’re inundated with romantic scripts across literature, music, film, and TV. In the past five years, as the world goes to shit, romantic fiction sales in the United States doubled to an all-time high. The romance industry’s tendrils extend far beyond art: consider the $570 billion global beauty industry as we alter ourselves in the name of desirability, or the $66 billion spent on American weddings each year as we glorify closing the deal. Like any capitalist industry is wont to do, the romance industry manufactures scarcity and exploits insecurity, and consumers have proved more than willing to buy in, both financially and emotionally.

Yet, what is so devious about this romance myth is that it’s cloaked in the language of love. The fairytale ending fails to mention that coupledom is tied to property relations, to social status, to deservingness of basic social services. There are 1,138 federal laws and statutes rewarding married couples with shared health insurance, social security benefits, and tax exemptions. The largest economic benefit friends receive is the occasional “dinner on me.” 

We’re encouraged to spend our lives searching, waiting, yearning, and altering ourselves until we find our soulmate, our one true love, our other half, our person. Then, when we believe we’ve found “The One,” the government rewards us legally and economically. No wonder we’re breaking girl code. 

Of course, this doesn’t have to result in dating your friend’s ex. We have agency, and many of us under these structural constraints are behaving as considerate friends with basic human decency. But girl code proves flimsy when pitted against the status and financial rewards of the romance myth.

At the Euphoria Season 3 premiere, the recently wronged Miller made her first public appearance since becoming America’s sweetheart and interviewed Sydney Sweeney about what should happen after you steal your friend’s ex. “[They] oughta get married, right?” Miller said, straight to camera. 

It’s a cheeky question for Sweeney, whose Euphoria character Cassie committed the very crime on trial: having sex with her best friend’s ex, lying about it, and then eventually getting into a serious relationship with the freak. Sweeney–a historically irreputable source of morality–responded, “I would hope so. You gotta make it worth it, at least. Make it worth something, not just worth too much pain.” If you’re going to devastate your friend, at least put a ring on it. 

But this logic is so twisted. If these sins are absolved by marriage, we’ve arrived at the romance myth’s ultimate conclusion: ‘til death do us part, by any means necessary. As we grasp to mitigate friendship betrayals, we continue reinforcing the same romantic primacy that got us hurt in the first place. Morals be damned! 

The romance myth, enforced by monogamy’s chokehold on our legal, economic, and social lives, renders any other forms of belonging invisible. So let’s dream bigger. 

What if we step back from fixating on the individuals involved and try aiming our anger at the system that encourages this behavior? Rather than promoting absolution via marriage, maybe we consider how monogamy and an overinvestment in romance depoliticizes women’s shared interests. Instead of invoking “girl code” only to punish women when they mess up, let’s build one that actually protects us: where friends could finally receive the legal recognition and economic benefits currently reserved for romantic relationships.

Maybe the cast can address that at Reunion.