(DON'T) MEET THE PARENTS

At twenty years of age, I have purposely avoided intimate meetings with the parents of the men I date.

The table was set for four. Unsure where to sit, I hovered until a seat was pulled out for me. A fork and spoon were to the left of the plate, and the knife was to the right. We had removed the matching water glasses from the table because we were already sipping on glasses from earlier. I didn’t see the little bowl to the top left; or maybe I did, but my subconscious couldn’t make heads or tails of it, so my brain discarded the bowl’s existence. And of course I was handed the fruit salad before anyone else, so I became instantly embarrassed when I realized I was the only one not using the bowl. Strike one.

At twenty years of age, I have purposely avoided intimate meetings with the parents of the men I date. Raised in a small town, I found it hard to avoid meeting parents altogether. It’s different to meet someone’s parents when you bump into them at the grocery store than it is when you are invited for dinner or a family event, though. I have nothing to hide, not consciously anyways, but the mere insinuation of the opportunity to meet the parents always makes me skittish. 

I want to be liked by parents and the adults in the lives of the people I am involved with, friends or partners or otherwise. Approval is a green light, especially when you’re younger in age. Even more importantly for a young woman like myself: meeting the parents solidifies things, especially in my family. If he caused me harm, he would have my father to deal with.

Being asked to meet someone’s parents always felt like they were asking to meet mine. Being asked to meet mine felt like a commitment I never wanted to make. Not with the men that have asked thus far, anyway. Jokes about my commitment issues are never far off when I breach the topic of avoiding the collision of parents and lovers, but the assumed commitment issues are a farce.

2016-2018

I was fifteen years old when I first dipped my toe into the dating scene. We were close friends without pause for years after we met my sophomore year of high school, and we verged on dating more often than we should have. Sociologists and psychologists could study the toxicity of that situationship and the damage it did to the both of us. Abandonment issues, infidelity, manipulation, and so many more of our respective relationship traumas stem from our time together. We were too young, making decisions neither of us was mature enough to make, and we still pay for it. I do, anyways.

To maintain the toxic relationship at hand required an impressive amount of cognitive dissonance. I do not think I possess the willpower or self-loathing to ever perform these mental acrobatics again. By my senior year, I knew he was unhealthy for me, but I couldn’t bear the thought of losing my quadannual fleeting moment in a relationship, or my best friend. 

Our relationship peaked at the end of fall semester of my senior year. He had graduated two years prior. We told each other that we had both abandoned our aspirations for a healthy relationship together, but we slipped into old habits again when reminiscing went too far. Historically, I had kept him from my parents and snuck around, but I wanted to maintain our most recent attempt at a relationship differently. He still accused me of not taking things seriously, so, when the opportunity presented itself, we met each other’s parents. 

My mother disliked him, and my father appeared to like him somewhat. At this point in my life, everything I did was either to benefit my future, or to please my mother. My dating life was for the latter. When it comes to my father, I simply didn’t want to cause him more stress than I already did. My parents wanted the best for me, including the best partner, but I knew anyone I brought home would be subpar in their eyes. And if they weren’t, then my parents would be skeptical that they weren’t flawed. 

They had this ideal man in their head, though the details were far more specific than humanly possible. The most noteworthy trait of this man, however, was kindness; a kindness that didn’t revolve around me, but included how he treated the world around him and made decisions that would affect beings outside of himself. This should have been a given, but it wasn’t for years.

Because of how young I was when this endeavor started, any expectations I had for myself and for a partner were vehemently skewed. This unhealthy relationship was my baseline: retaliation when being mistreated, not stepping out of line for fear of being left, and looking the other way when red flags started waving. I often felt lost with this baseline that felt wrong to me intuitively, so I relied heavily on my parents’ reactions and expectations. Not being able to trust my own judgment, even if only subconsciously, created a deep-seated anxiety surrounding what I was to expect from partners. This persisted through the years. 

The boy and I went on dates for a few short weeks before we had a major falling out when the small town nature of our community led me to accusing him of seeing someone else. We broke up a month later. 

2019

By the time I got into Brown, the boy from my hometown and I finally went our separate ways, for the most part. I was excited at the prospect of a fresh start in a new place that was untainted by my past and, more importantly, where no one knew what I had been through.

I enjoyed the freedom of college as many first years do during their first semester, but then I started seeing someone equally toxic, only in a different way. This new man held none of the traits that bred toxicity in my last relationship; he was the perfect example of how too much of a good thing can be a bad thing. 

This was not a man I could take home to my parents. This man did not meet any of the expectations my parents had for my future partner, and frankly he didn’t meet mine either. There were no red flags present, though later I realized it was because nothing about him was a green flag. He didn’t hide anything, not because he had nothing to hide, but because he didn’t deem me worth hiding things from. And, needless to say, he wasn’t a kind man.

This should have changed things — ended things with him, even, but it didn’t. Perhaps it was because my internal need to please everyone around me was fading with age, or perhaps it was that something about him was magnetic. I couldn’t pinpoint it if I tried, but depending on the moment, perhaps it had to do with how engrossed with me he was when our eyes met, or the fact that he drove my favorite car from my childhood.

We established that we weren’t dating for any certain reasons; we simply enjoyed playing house together. He would come and stay with me for a weekend at a time from his home in Connecticut, and I would take advantage of the opportunity to have a car on campus to run errands and get away from the university. All was well until I returned to Michigan for winter break. 

I asked him to drive to Michigan to visit since he said he wouldn’t mind the trip, but upon realizing he would have to meet my parents, I decided against having him over. He was fine at the prospect of meeting my parents, but if we weren’t going to date for longevity and if he wouldn’t please my parents regardless, there was no reason. He sympathized, knowing the role they played in my life and how poorly they would receive him, and he said that he’d see me in a month.

Two weeks later, he asked what town I lived in. I told him, confused. He said he had been in Michigan visiting a friend for the week, and that he wanted to see me even if he couldn’t stay. Looking at the time, I asked him what time he had to be back in Connecticut for work the next day, and we realized he had to leave immediately to be there on time. 

He called me later that night while he drove home and guiltily spilled the truth about why he was in my state. After reconnecting with an old friend, he came to visit her, and he ended up sleeping with her. We had established exclusivity, so this was far from okay. Even so, I felt as though I was to blame; if I’d let him meet my parents, maybe that wouldn’t have happened. Maybe the risk of me leaving him wasn’t enough to inhibit this, but having met my father may have been. Not for intimidation, but for my partner to know I stood firmly on the issue. I know now that he doesn’t deserve my excuses on his behalf, but I felt miserable about it at the time and stayed with him a week longer as a result. Once I had a reality check in the form of three best friends who were appalled with his behavior, we went our separate ways.

I called it quits on dating, and then I realized how much more time I had for my friends, academics, and professional life. I was finally at peace without the mental anguish of men, and my mental health reaped the benefits of it. I found myself in the thick of networking and actively participating in classes, all while enjoying my friends and myself on the weekends through mixers and dinners downtown. The experiences I came to college for were finally the experiences I was having.

The pandemic rolled through nearly a month later, and then I had an excuse to not continue my abstinence from dating. I tried my hand at things like Datamatch for companionship, but nothing stuck, but I didn’t mind at the end of the day. Fast forward, and I am spending my sophomore year studying remotely from Michigan. I was back in the place where the first toxic ex still reverberated through my room on the worst nights, and in the place where I refused to even mingle with the locals for entertainment. 

2021

Halfway through my sophomore fall semester, I moved to a new city to live with my sister. There, I retried my hand at dating apps and met someone new. Someone better, though I didn’t know that at the time. A week in, I accidentally ghosted him due to an influx of text message communications resulting from my being remote. When we reconnected, I was prioritizing my academics and my professional life in an effort to maintain them in the thick of a pandemic, and he waited three months for a first date. By the time we went out on our first date, we couldn’t get enough of each other. He may contest this to save face, but we both know better.

My time with him thus far has taught me a lot, mostly about myself.  Properly this time, I have the space to unpack the self-inflicted anxiety from my teenage years. He has given me the space to vent my concerns as they arise; I never have to swallow them or worry about his reaction. He comes to me with the less fun conversations and doesn’t tiptoe around tough topics. I’m learning what it is like to feel safe when with a partner.

By now, we’ve been dating for two months. I’m not his girlfriend. We’re taking things too slowly for that to have already happened. We’re simply dating. Even so, two months in, I’m living alone while housesitting, and he decided he wanted me to go to a St. Patrick’s Day dinner with his grandparents.

When he mentioned it in conversation — he hadn’t even actually asked his grandma for permission to ask me yet — I said yes without hesitation. 

When we got into the car after dinner, I immediately began apologizing for embarrassing him with my fruit bowl incident. I nervously began to rant about how I wasn’t used to table settings like that and how I was too focused on the rest of my manners to even notice the bowl. He stopped me mid-sentence. 

“Grandma does not care, I promise you. Poppa was just as confused as you. He saw you put your fruit salad on your plate and almost did the same thing before realizing there were no other salads on the table for the bowl.”

It was quiet for a moment. I turned forward again and sat back in my seat. He started the car and turned to me. “My grandma really liked you. I could tell by her body language at the end of the night.” He said this in a matter of fact way, as if he couldn’t care less — realistically, he probably didn’t — but I cared. Even making it into the room without copping out once was enough to consider the night a success, even if it doesn’t mean everything I would have construed it to mean a year ago.

AUTHOR: Juliette Woodcum is in her second year at Brown. She enjoys long sits on the steps of the Hay and even longer naps on any available couch.

ARTIST: MacKenzie Butler is an Illustrator finishing her third year at RISD, and she enjoys depicting the softness, the sensuality, and the intimacies of life in her work.