I saw a tweet recently where a woman asked the Twitterverse for some advice:

If you were a 15-year-old boy who’s having trouble with girls, feeling rejected, and insecure, what advice would you give?

I dove into the comments and found a bunch of adults who all seemed to have one thing in common: they were all wrong.

The main theme of these responses was this: Don’t focus on girls right now, you’ve got your whole life to find girls, enjoy being a teenager!

And I thought since when is being a teenager enjoyable? Being a 15-year-old boy around girls is like being an addict around heroin who knows how to dance and calls you by name.

If the internet wants to insist on sterilizing reality, I feel it is my duty as an ex-15-year-old boy to give some realistic advice:

First and foremost, keep your god damn hands to yourself: Gotta get this one out of the way. Horniness is like hunger. And it can be agony. But I promise, no matter how much it digs into your gut, it won’t kill you.

Masturbate: seriously. If any adult in your life has been telling you that masturbation is bad, I am here to tell you that your pet adult is an idiot. But, and this is important, and I can’t believe we need to say this these days, but don’t, under any circumstances, masturbate at people.

Also, while we’re here, if some girl decides to go out with you, masturbate sometime beforehand; horniness is messy. It gets in your eyes, your ears, your nose, and if too much of it is in the air, you’ll miss out on what a great person she actually is.

Be careful with porn. Porn wasn’t huge when I was a kid. It was the 90-00s. We had “Bring It On” and whatever we could scrounge up out of National Geographic. It terrifies me to think of what kind of monster I would have become if I had porn in my pocket 24-7.

Try to masturbate without porn at least 75 percent of the time. Not only does porn give you unrealistic expectations, but too much of it can also lead to erectile dysfunction (when your penis doesn’t work). And really, kids aren’t using their imagination enough these days.

Your friend Kevin didn’t have sex, and if he did, it was bad sex. The number of dumb-f*cks in high school who have falsely claimed to have had sex could be melted down and molded into dumb-f*ck-Everest.

Most of them haven’t, and if they have, it was likely fast and embarrassing and they’re only rubbing it in your face because society has shamed young men into thinking they shouldn’t properly express their emotions. And they cried. Naked.

Rejection is not a bad thing. This translates to all of life. If you’re rejected, this means only one thing: You had the courage to go for it. That’s it. And no girl likes a coward.

Don’t learn to play the guitar. This is a mistake many young men make. They see the kid who plays guitar getting a bunch of girls and so they learn to play guitar. Here’s a free secret: 99.9 percent of people who play guitar, suck at guitar.

Yes, girls will initially find it endearing, but 10 years down the road, you’re just that guy who interrupts conversations at parties while everyone sits politely and thinks, “Eek, that girl he brought looks a little young for him, huh?” Just think of all the time you could spend learning how to not be a douchebag instead. Point being: Don’t do anything just because you think it will make girls like you.

And most of all: Being 15 sucks. You can’t drive, you can’t vote, and you still have to listen to your parents even though by now you’ve probably caught on to the fact that they’re just f*cking winging it.

You’re pretty much just an annoying plant.

But the thing is, all 15-year-olds are like this. And a lot of adults too: insecure, confused, and horny. Nobody at your age has everything figured out.

Except for that kid, James, who has a gorgeous girlfriend, goes on holiday to Europe, and is adored by everyone. He had sex. He was pretty good at it, too, and his penis isn’t at all weird. He’s going to be fine.

And that’s just life.

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