newgirlfriend

THE VALUE OF FRIENDS TO A FOOL IN LOVE

In a straight relationship, you know you’ve crossed some threshold to the status of longterm prospect
when you’re invited to Meet The Parents. This ritual is usually an agony for everyone concerned, but
once it’s done, the relationship can continue on its expected trajectory, pretty much regardless of how
unimpressed the parents are—because who, after all, stops doing anything just because your parents
think it’s a bad idea?
The rainbow tribe has an even tougher rite of passage: we have to get our new loves past the
gauntlet of our inner circle of friends. For the new prospect, the stamp of approval here is a crucial
victory. If they can’t pass muster with the inner circle, chances are good that their longterm potential
is not so good. And our friends will appraise our heartthrob with gimlet eyes as critical and cynical as
any parent’s.
“She’s wonderful!” you warble. “She’s sent me flowers every day since we met!”
   “Stalker,” your best friend coughs into her hand.
   “She is not!” you protest—not too indignantly, because there was that girl last fall who left collages
of cut-up magazine models on your front door and required a restraining order to stop her calling you
at work. But this is SO different.
“She hasn’t even tried to get me over to her place yet,” you say.
   “Maybe she’s homeless,” one of your friends suggests.
   “She’s not homeless,” you insist. “And she’s gonna be moving to a bigger place soon, when she
starts her new job.”
   “You know what that translates to? She’s getting evicted because she hasn’t paid her rent
because she doesn’t have a job. Run for your life, fool! Run!”
   And this is all before they’ve even laid eyes on the new light of your life. The inner circle only wants
you to be happy. But your friends have dealt with the fallout of your starry-eyed states before. And
you know how sometimes you can’t see what you’re about to step in because you’re right there, right
on top of it, but someone a little farther away can easily see it, and maybe even warn you: “Hey, watch
out, there’s something gross on the sidewalk right there…”? Sometimes a little distance can improve
perspective. And because they can see clearly where you cannot, to your friends falls the difficult,
delicate, thankless task of tactfully checking you when you’re about to go happily skipping into a black
hole of doom.
   “So her husband’s cool with her ‘bicurious exploration’, huh?”
   “Dude, I know you’re really into this guy—I mean, I know you said how he was set up and all, but he
is fresh out of prison. Are you sure it’s such a good idea to let him move in with you?”
   “She seems nice enough, but the Aileen Wuornos tattoo worries me. A LOT.”
   You may protest a little, but you have to give the circle its due. These are, after all, the people who
have put up with all your past dumbass relationship decisions. They’ve heard your last-call Absolut
truths as you’ve swooned and ranted and cried over various potential soulmates. They know your
weaknesses. They know your patterns.   Maybe they helped you move in with that one guy even
though you’d only known him for nine days, and then moved you out two weeks later when he piled all
your stuff in the yard and lit it on fire. Or they picked you up at the airport and consoled you with
Jager bombs all night after your girlfriend dumped you for a snowboard instructor in Tahoe.
It’s their job to try to keep you tethered to the real world in the early stages of a severe infatuation,
when your new greatest thing could be writing checks on your account for weapons-grade plutonium
and you would believe whatever ridiculous explanation he or she spoon-fed you. You can’t help it; you
have been rendered forgivably but hopelessly senseless by love or lust or codependence.
Apparently, it affects the olfactory nerve—you can’t smell bullshit or danger in that condition. That’s
what friends are for.
So here’s to the inner circle, the chosen family that catches us when we fall, cheers us when we soar,
and is for the most part kind enough to spare us the “I told you so’s” when they have to help us sweep
up the pieces of our hearts, our lives, or our Hummel figurines. Much love, y’all.
###