The Things We Learned: Long Live the Boy Band!

“Don’t cry because it’s over,” Pinterest tells us. “Smile because it happened.” This is often bullshit and generally unhelpful advice when it comes to vacations, but regarding the dismantling of boy bands like One Direction, it is flawless.

Like a mother watching her daughter sob uncontrollably over her almost-ex-boyfriend who has preemptively broken up with her before college (“But we’ll still have the summer to hook up together!”) I wish I could croon this sage idiom to the crowd of Directioners mourning the imminent loss of their favorite musical crew. Hush little baby. I know it hurts. Their wounds still fresh from the foreshadow of Zayn’s departure, the month of March will come sooner for them than any other.

But you and I — wizened adults who’ve experienced countless heartaches — know that eventually, both the heart and mind move on. Girlfriends, boyfriends and boy bands alike become distant memories of happy nostalgia; of notebooks filled with sappy gel-penned letters; of paint chipped walls stripped of color where Scotch Tape once held up multiple Tiger Beat posters.

Recall the chorus of Peggy Lee’s famous song: “Is that all there is to love?”

Now remember how just before that, she sings the truth:

“We were so very much in love.

Then one day, he went away and I thought I’d die.

But I didn’t.”

But I didn’t.

You never do.

Instead, you take out your phone and scroll through old photos and ask yourself instead how you once prayed to procreate with a man who had a better handle on white-after-Labor-Day than you do.

Or how you were okay with polygamy so long as everyone involved wore their clothes backwards.

“How,” you may ask yourself, “Did I love a Kangol hat and a tribal tat so deeply?”

But the real question is, when it comes to boy band fashion: how could you not?

You’ll never forget the baby blue everything, nor the abs.

You won’t forget the way it felt to sleep upon their faces (screen-printed across your pillow shams).

So let your takeaway be happy memories of love, yes. But also the fashion.

Always the fashion.

Because regardless of how we feel now, we always knew they were beautiful.

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