Ladies, as we kick off the official start to swimsuit season, I have good news. Against my better judgment, but desperate for help with limited solo shopping days before school was to let out, I posted the following status update to my Facebook page a few weeks ago:

“Swimsuit shopping today (likely followed by tequila at home). It’s been awhile, any suggestions on where to look?”

Immediately my girlfriends in the Facebook sisterhood came to my rescue with detailed battle plans involving specialty shops and miracle suits. These girls led me to websites and clothing racks packed with promises, backed by testimony, one even going so far as to call a store for me to see if her personal favorite was in stock.

Within an hour I had mapped out my course, allotting 20 minutes from sales floor to dressing room at each stop.

As informative as they were, though, it wasn’t the women who provided me with the most eye-opening insight into how to pick a swimsuit, but the men in my (admittedly dysfunctional) Facebook family.

While the women immediately circled the wagons with rallying cries of gut-cinching and rump-lifting, it was the men who disarmed my very realistic fear of donning every suit to find I, in spite of the various and random minutes spent at the gym and the occasional piece of lettuce that might accidentally fall onto my plate, still look nothing like Jillian Michaels in the mirror.

These wonderful fellas did not lead off with how to conceal stretch marks or turn back time to 1996, before my body took on the role of rental property four times over. No, these guys jumped to my aid with suggestions ranging from Cirillas to a website that would have made Hugh Hefner blush. One dear male friend even offered to shop with me.

I did not take any of these gentlemen up on their offers, but they did lead to a liberating revelation.

As I drove to the first stop on the list, it occurred to me that men don’t worry about it all as much as we women do. They are not the ones flipping through the airbrushed pages of Cosmo comparing our bodies to those in magazines, we are. Their magazines have cars and football players in them. (Granted a few of their magazines have naked women in front of cars and football players, but men aren’t worried about whether or not those gals have well-defined triceps.) They do not spend so much as a nanosecond scanning us for cellulite, stretch marks or sagging anatomy, because they just do not care.

It was with this attitude, abandoning the worries that typically plague those of us blessed with double-X chromosomes that I found a swimsuit at store number two (not Cirillas). It’s cute, comfortable and, unlike store number one (also not Cirillas), does not allow my derrière to hang out of the bottom.

Enjoy the hunt, ladies, and remember that the only person worried about how you look is you.