The girl’s perspective: Opinion Editor Amanda Bixby

Prom will be a magical night you’ll never forget. At least, so you’ve heard. Lately you can’t hear anything over the sound of your date complaining about how “Guys have to pay for everything!” “Prom is so expensive!” and my personal favorite, “If girls are so independent, why don’t they pay for their own ticket?”

Boo-hoo. If I hear one more guy complain about the cost of prom, I’m going to explode. Oh, you have to rent a tux, get tickets, and pay for dinner? Well we have to buy a dress, buy matching shoes, get our hair done, get our nails done, AND get our makeup done. Not only do girls have to pay more than guys, but they must go through a complete(ly unpleasant) makeover. We feel pressured to look perfect for this night because of the movies, TV shows, songs, and books that romanticize prom as the night an ugly duckling transforms into a beautiful swan. The nerds shed their glasses, the girls with boyish haircuts clip in extensions, and plain Janes glue on fake eyelashes. Yet guys get to complain? The only pressure men feel is the pressure to choose the right color of tie. Perfection is expected from females. Not only do they want to look hot for their dates, but they also often participate in a silent competition on who can look the most stunning. This brings me to the search for the perfect dress.

Girls spend weeks, even months picking out the perfect dress. How you look in this dress is how your classmates will remember you for years. Even if you do find the perfect dress, it’s rarely the perfect fit. After paying for a dress, you might also have to pay for a tailor. On the other hand, the hardest wardrobe choice guys have to make is if they should wear sneakers or dress shoes to the dance.

Along with choosing a dress, men will never know the struggle of getting their hair yanked out by a hairdresser who cannot grasp the concept of “loose curls.” The last thing girls want is to go into the salon a perfectly functioning human and come out a demented poodle. After this process, we get the treat of having either a stranger who wears too much perfume or one of our friends smears too much makeup on our face.

By the time we’ve gone through this painful and costly process, we still have to act like we like our date and attempt to dance with them. Most girls look forward to spinning around the dancefloor with their handsome date, but the reality is that guys are often too shy to dance. When we’ve put in so much work to look pretty, it’s a huge letdown to spend the night on the edge of the dancefloor with a date that is “too cool” to have fun at a school function.

When the night finally comes to a close, girls are faced with one last challenge: warding off their date’s wandering hands on the drive home. Believe it or not, just because some girl agreed to go to prom with you doesn’t mean she’s in love with you. Men need to learn how to be gentlemen who treat their date with respect but know how to have fun.

Prom should be all about going out with someone whose company you enjoy and making lasting memories. Though there are negative aspects of prom for both girls and guys, anyone can take prom into their own hands and make it a night for the books.

The boy’s perspective: Reporter Daniel Arndt

Although the girls are the ones that cry over their prom plans, boys don’t have it easy either; we just don’t shout our complaints over Twitter. Behind the scene, I’ve seen guys puke (and not for the reason you’re thinking), stop being friends for over a year, and clean up their proposal in front of a group of people before the girl even gets there. We also get sick from the twists and turns that the rollercoaster that we call prom has in store for us, and at the end of it all, we have to “take it like a man.” Girls have it rough too, but they’ll never have to deal with these problems:

Everybody out there has probably been rejected at some point in their life, maybe not rejected from dating or a dance, but everyone seeks acceptance of some sort, and sometimes it comes up short. The one not-so-terrible thing about rejection is that if you act like it never happened, no one will find out, and it will actually be like nothing ever happened. With dances, everyone and their dog will know when you get rejected, and this is where the puking comes into play. I’ve sat outside of a park port-a-potty as my friend puked his guts out because of the dangerous yet small chance of his future homecoming date having nothing to say but “no.”

She ended up saying yes, but the week leading up to the most relieving moment of his life, was one of the worst weeks of our lives. It was filled with awkward hints that he would try to give out, and she would never fail to miss. All of this was because of the fear of rejection, something girls will never have to deal with during prom. That overwhelming thought that you could possibly walk into the school the next day as “the kid that no one wants to dance with” can bring out the worst in us, even before the fun starts.

A “yes” can destroy a man too if it is aimed in the wrong direction, because to some, prom is a competition and that certain girl is the trophy. The month before prom can be all-out warfare, and although I’ve never taken a bullet, I’ve had to take care of the casualties.

My best friends have gone after the same girl, and in two different situations and relationships, these people still don’t talk to each other. Girls will never have to deal with this because they always have the excuse of “he asked me, what was I supposed to do?” All we can say is: “I wanted to go with her and I didn’t want you to go with her.” Prom can ruin relationships that you’d think would never be affected by a silly dance, which is a lot worse than a girl’s makeup getting ruined (which is the worst of their problems).

Sometimes, it’s not a yes or a no; sometimes it’s just that awkward “don’t ask me” that can be the most painful, and sometimes it comes at the worst time. I’ve personally had to text a guy: “Don’t ask her dude, she’s being a… well… you know, and just told me she’s gonna say no.” The response to this text was even worse though: “But… I already started… Can you help me clean this up before she sees?” Being the great friend that I am, I helped him clean up the most elaborate dance proposal setup I’ve ever seen, as he started talking about how he’s going to have to play board games with his parents on Homecoming night instead of have the time of his life. He ended up having a pretty good board game night, but nevertheless, it was a bittersweet Candyland match.

These aren’t even the worst cases I’ve seen, but I think you get the idea: Guys have it worse than girls, even though girls have to deal with their hair messing up during pictures.