IN FOCUS: the art of insincerely wishing your BFF happy birthday on social media

To have a happy birthday you must first accept that the day has absolutely nothing to do with you or you achievement in beating all the other love tadpoles to the finishing line. So stop being a self indulgent megabitch and let your friends relish in the attention they so sorely crave on this momentous day.

Wishing your bestie happy birthday has become a social media marathon event which will take all your cunning. First and foremost, you’re going to need to use some tacky app to put together a happy birthday collage for your main post.

This is an important step because the main post is where all the love & adoration will flow in from people praising you for being such a thoughtful friend. When in actual fact, you probably couldn’t five a fark if the birthday girl lived or died.

Photo choice is everything. You need to strike the balance between “obviously posting photos of your bestie looking like a sack of steaming horseshit” and “obviously posting photos of yourself looking like a spicy little Zinger box”. It’s a fine line, to be sure.

Once you’ve clearly established dominance in the hot-stakes, it’s time to get to work crafting a caption so cheesy that it would make a lactose intolerant person piss out of their arse just at the mere sight of.

Pull out all the cliche stops as you pull out your super soaker of insincerity and aim for total sop-suration of your intended target. Make sure to refer to them as “this human”, “this 10” or “this one”.

Remember thought, it’s best to save “partner in crime” for the annual appearance of your boyfriend on your insta story. One day he’ll earn a feed post, one day.

Now don’t bask in the adoration you receive for your kind words too long. Her other friends will be dishing up their emotional banquets too and you have no intention of ending up in the leftover scrap bin of birthday pleasantries. Welcome to the competitive aspect of the birthday marathon.

At this stage, your friends birthday isn’t even solely about you anymore. It’s also about crushing the other coconut-buttered-dipshits that dare take a shot at wearing the tiara of best friend on this day. How you tackle this depends on your inherent level of pettiness. Naturally, the pettier the better.

Attack their collages with passive-aggressive weapons of mass bitchstruction. A nice little way to play it is to post a comment under another friend’s collage redirecting the attention back to yourself in some way.

Perhaps an anecdote from the night that paints you in a brighter light than a stained glass chapel during a nuclear explosion.

After you have successfully sabotaged all pretenders to the throne it’s time to put in some serious work on the Instagram stories front. Dig deep into those old FB photo albums for as many photos as you can possibly find. Each and everyone is going to stare in it’s own story.

Go hard until the lines on top of the story look like a dotted line. 50? Rookie number, pump it up. 100? Starting to get the right idea. After all, friendship is a quantifiable metric now and bigger is better.

Even if every photo makes your friend look like a smashed crab auditioning for the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Documenting the Human Zoo is thirsty work, so if you enjoyed what you read how about buying Belle a beer, ay?

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