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A few weeks ago, when FYPs started flooding with TikToks featuring hapless boyfriends doing hapless boyfriend things captioned something to the effect of, “Can’t believe I changed my emergency contact from the woman who birthed me to this,” I laughed along with the best of them. Haha, that man who just smushed his head into a giant pile of snow is your best bet in case of an emergency? As Chappell Roan might say, good luck, babe!
And then an uncomfortable reality occurred to me. As a woman in my late 20s, I too have outgrown the convenience and guaranteed good-sense decision-making of having my mother as my go-to emergency contact. And as a single woman in my late 20s, I have replaced her with…uh, no one.
It’s not the first time I’ve considered this, of course. Every time I’m forced to lie my way through fill out paperwork at the doctor, I pause for a minute when it asks for my emergency contact. Do I put my roommate, who, if our penchant for blacking out at bottomless brunch together is any indication, is just as likely as I am to be in a state of emergency—if not the exact same emergency—at any given time? My ethically non-monogamous lover, who I’m pretty sure is already at least three other people’s emergency contact due to the fact that he is an incredibly put-together Virgo and also has a family? Should I just make up a husband so I don’t look like a loser? WHO IS IN CHARGE OF ME?!
Usually I end up putting my mom’s name down anyway despite the fact that she lives roughly 200 miles away and just hope no emergencies occur—which I guess is pretty much what I’d be hoping regardless!
But recently, as I scrolled past boyfriends turned emergency contacts in various states of dubious reliability, a far more harrowing possibility occurred to me: In the absence of parent or partner, am I…my own emergency contact?
I’ll admit that I sometimes take a kind of smug satisfaction in my singlehood—one that’s usually only reinforced by TikTok trends featuring boyfriends failing to peel oranges and such. But the emergency contact trend hit different, as they say. Watching bumbling boyfriends flail their way through basic tasks, I wasn’t congratulating myself on having the good sense not to abandon my mom as my emergency contact for that—I was shaking at the abject horror that I’d abandoned my mom as my emergency contact for me.
Me! A woman who, on more than one occasion, has fallen asleep with a candle burning! One whose phone screen is perpetually cracked and who once accidentally dropped said phone down a literal gutter. A woman who regularly shoves limbs into closing elevators and subway doors, always exceeds the recommended dosage of ibuprofen “just to be safe,” and whose idea of drinking responsibly is putting Emergen-C in my bottomless mimosas when I have a cold. That’s me! I am the boyfriend! I am my own incompetent life partner! I can’t be my own emergency contact—I’m my own emergency!
All of which is to say that if TikTok has you side-eyeing your own lover/emergency contact and questioning your life choices, it could be worse! And if you, like me, find yourself among the single and emergency contactless, allow me to leave you with a bit of ancient wisdom from one self-contained emergency to another: Fuck it, we ball.
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