If you’ve ever found yourself spending hours swiping through various dating apps trying to find a potential match, you’re not alone. Nowadays, it seems more common for people to meet online or on apps before meeting face-to-face.

While some find online dating fun, others find it tiresome and enlist their friends to help them swipe and find matches. It seems this trend has become so popular that Tina Wilson decided there should be an entire app where your friends find matches for you, called Wingman.

Wilson drew from her own experiences with dating apps. “I was never comfortable dating online. Most of my single friends were in relationships … they were unable to come out on the single circuit with me, yet they were always very interested in my dating life and wanted to support my journey” Wilson told Digital Trends, “When I finally got online, they were my champions — sitting alongside me helping me write my profile, choosing who I should go out with. I remember thinking it’d be really cool if we were able to do this remotely.”

After downloading the app, you can invite a friend to become your “wingman.” If they accept the invite, they can fill out your profile with the basics. They will enter whether you’re interested in men or women (or both), what their relationship is to you, how long they’ve known you, and why they think you’re unique. There is also a section where your wingman chooses between likes you have such as “shopping or surfing” or “chocolate or cheese.”

“In the first iteration of [Wingman], there were so many options, so many things you could do. When we actually put that out and started testing it, I think people were confused … I think because it’s different, it doesn’t have anything that is comparable to it … we had to really make sure it was clear what people were doing,” Wilson said. Essentially, she expressed that she wanted “to keep it really simple [and] to create a platform that enables us to introduce our friends to great people, and have some fun along the way.”

With the simple layout, it’s now easy to be your friend’s wingman. After the profile is up, the wingman can swipe through potential matches. You will also be able to swipe through potential matches, but can’t actually pick “like” or “dislike.” Instead, you can send the potential candidate to your wingman, who makes the final call. Could this finally be the end of our online dating woes?

Watching The Breakfast Club again as an adult, there are plenty of things I realized I missed…

I’ve seen so many movies where the “undesirable looking” lady gets a makeover. Take Grease and Clueless, for example. The Breakfast Club also follows suit, with Claire transforming Ally Sheedy’s character Allison from a scruffy emo into what she believes is the way high school students should look. However, I thought she looked perfectly fine before the makeover. In fact, the makeover takes away the charm and mysterious aura that she previously had. Basically, conformity sucks.

I’m sorry, but in what universe does it make sense that Claire and John Bender would end up together? Oh, that’s right – this one! To be fair, it is a classic trope in high school life that students date the wrong people and don’t fully understand what it truly means to love and more importantly – be loved. Claire is a typical example of this. For most of the movie, Bender verbally and emotionally taunts her, and she ends up with him anyway!

Hollywood has often been accused of misrepresenting women and constantly putting men at the forefront of stories. This created the Bechdel Test – which basically tests to see if a piece of fiction has two women discussing something other than a man. Although John Hughes might not have been familiar with it at the time, he ended up passing the Bechdel test with The Breakfast Club. During Allison’s makeover, she has an exchange of words with Claire and they never mention a guy!

It’s not just the big topics and controversial points of discussion in The Breakfast Club that drive me crazy. It’s the little things, you know? The insignificant moments that create some levity for our compelling characters. Take this moment, for example, when Claire shows off her unorthodox party trick. It will forever go down in history as “the lipstick scene.” From my own personal experience, it’s extremely difficult to do, making Molly Ringwald’s achievement even more impressive.

I don’t mean to rub it in anyone’s face, but I was never in detention at school. So I don’t really know what students are supposed to do during this period. Does one simply sit back and reflect on their mistakes? I know that Bart Simpson writes his crimes multiple times on the class board. However, what the students in The Breakfast Club have to do seems extremely unrealistic. They have to write a 1,000-word essay in eight hours.

While The Breakfast Club puts a number of stereotypes in the same room in order to focus on their commonalities, society has changed since then. Sure, the brain, the athlete, the basket case, the criminal, and the princess coming together is a classic setup. However, it’s not so simple these days. Nowadays, every high school student acts like an individual with their own quirks and unique characteristics. I’ve never considered myself as part of one particular stereotype.

Personally, I never had a teacher who I wholeheartedly despised. However, the characters in The Breakfast Club have plenty of good reasons to loathe Vice Principal Vernon. Not only is he condescending and bitter to his students, but he is also extremely mean, particularly to John Bender. There are a number of times when Vernon treats Bender inappropriately. Firstly, he physically threatens him and secondly, he embarrasses him in front of his peers. Teachers can be just as bad as their students.

Let’s face it, who doesn’t remember the crew from The Breakfast Club dancing to “We Are Not Alone” by Karla DeVito? It’s without a doubt one of the most iconic scenes in ’80s cinema, maybe even of all time! I must say though, it certainly does not go without a strong sense of irony when I get out the shower, start dancing around by myself and singing at the top of my lungs the words “We Are Not Alone!”

Throughout The Breakfast Club, there are numerous occasions when the students label each other as “crazy” and “weird.” They don’t always understand each other’s behavior and quirks. The kids simply jump to these loaded words without actually understanding each other. One thing is for sure, these ’80s students might not have been as clued up on mental illness as they may have been in this day and age. In more recent times, schools have managed to treat mental illness with more sensitivity.

So I didn’t know this, but apparently, it wasn’t always Judd Nelson who John Hughes wanted to play the criminal that is. John Bender. Apparently, one of the high-profile names that Hughes considered for the iconic role was none other than Nicolas Cage, which, in my opinion, would’ve made the movie even better than it already was. John Cusack was another frontrunner for the role. However, it was ultimately Nelson who landed the part.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I ever felt the type of pressure at school to do well quite like Brian did in The Breakfast Club. The “geek” of the gang was in detention after bringing a flare gun to school. He was planning to do something terrible with it. However, after it explodes in his locker, it turns out that detention indirectly saves his life. Many high school kids face the same sort of pressures that Brian did.

If there is one thing that Hollywood has portrayed differently over the years – it’s bullying. In The Breakfast Club, there are many instances of bullying between a variety of different people. While this may have been an accurate portrayal of bullying back then, things have changed. In 21 Jump Street, Channing Tatum plays a guy who was once a bully who gets sent to undercover work at a school. However, he learns that the students hate bullies and that it is heavily frowned upon.

As previously mentioned, I have never been in a situation where I had to go to detention. However, from what I know, they generally take place either during lunchtime or at the end of a school day. When I first watched The Breakfast Club years ago, I never batted an eyelid at the idea of these kids having detention on a Saturday. But now, it completely baffles me. Not to mention the fact that they had to arrive at 7 am!

Now, I was never the most active participant in school sports. However, based on what I saw from those who were active, the culture reminded me a lot of Andrew from The Breakfast Club. Most “jocks,” as they tend to be called, aren’t necessarily bad people. They simply put up a wall of masculinity to cover up their own insecurities. It’s clear that Andrew suffers from the pressure of sport, which ends up turning him into a bully.

While I’ve spent most of this article attacking things about The Breakfast Club that I only noticed as an adult, I still enjoy the movie. In fact, I still consider myself a huge fan of the many movies that John Hughes made. These include the likes of Sixteen Candles, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Planes, Trains and Automobiles, to name a few. I didn’t actually realize that Hughes passed away over a decade ago, which is a huge loss to the world of film.

Listen, I am still disgusted at the idea of John Bender and Claire having a happy ending together in The Breakfast Club. However, I can’t help but still love their cheesy ending together as they share a kiss and Claire plants one of her earrings in one of John’s leather-gloved palms. But nothing will beat the moment that he takes that earring and wears it, as he watches Claire drive away. It’s iconic, and always will be.

I don’t know about you, but as far as I can see, The Breakfast Club paints this idea that adulthood sucks. Allison hits this home when she says, “when you grow up, your heart dies.” However, as I have grown up, I feel just as optimistic about life as I did when I was 16 years old. Here’s an interesting question: did The Breakfast Club actually help this generation learn from one’s past mistakes and save their hearts from dying?

It’s always a problem with any breakthrough role. An actor or actress might struggle to eclipse the success of their first role. It happened to Mark Hamill, it happened to Matthew Broderick, and surely enough, it happened to pretty much the entire cast of The Breakfast Club. While I firmly believe that the cast members were typecast after their iconic roles, the cynical side of me says that maybe it’s because studios don’t trust their acting skills.

When you watch a movie as a kid, you don’t pay attention to the behind the scenes details. So when I watched The Breakfast Club for the first time, I had no idea that Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall were an item before they even agreed to work on the movie. It turns out that the duo originally worked together on another John Hughes project – Sixteen Candles. They started dating, only to break up just before working on The Breakfast Club.

In The Breakfast Club, Allison is quite good at getting others to speak honestly about themselves. Amazingly, she does this by making up stuff about herself. However, what she tells Claire is actually really disturbing, in hindsight. She lies about having an affair with her psychologist. Furthermore, she reassures Claire that it was purely consensual, simply because she “paid him.” When I watched this scene recently, I can’t believe I thought nothing of it when I was younger.

I’m going to admit it now – I had a bit of crush on bad boy John Bender back in the day. However, after watching The Breakfast Club in more recent times, I have no idea what I saw in him! While he has his moments and is even sympathetic at times, I can’t forgive him for the way he talks to his peers, especially to Claire. He constantly harasses her with profanities and disgusting pickup lines.

I’m thoroughly impressed with how brutally honest The Breakfast Club was when it came to the hard-pressing topics of adolescent life. One of the topics that the high school students discuss during detention is whether or not they’ve yet been intimate with someone, with different characters having different views on the matter. While John mocks Brian for not having reached that monumental life moment yet, Claire reassures him that it’s perfectly fine. Moreover, Allison commends Claire for also admitting that she has never “done it,” while criticizing the way that students generally treat the subject.

l

To be fair, any substance is bound to alter one’s behavior. However, I’ve never seen someone react quite like Andrew did in The Breakfast Club. While the gang had a brief moment of unity as they smoked together and most of them got a chance to chill, Andrew reacted to it in a really strange way. He starts running around, yelling, and being quite aggressive. The substance in question is supposed to calm you down; not the opposite!

One reason that I still have to sympathize with John Bender is due to his troubling family life. By the sounds of it, it makes perfect sense that Judd Nelson’s character acts the way he does in The Breakfast Club. With virtually no role models in his life, Bender suffers untellable abuse at home, both verbally and physically. I lost my mind after recently watching it. John admits that his father attacked him with a cigar after he spilled some paint.

While movies have always had creative license to be offensive if it serves the story, I can’t help but feel that The Breakfast Club took things slightly too far. The characters dish out homophobic slurs left, right, and center! John Bender is the main culprit, even suggesting that Andrew is gay because he wrestles. Even Brian gets in on the act!