Do you have ‘Meet the Partners’ anxiety?
‘All kinds of stuff could put them off: your mainly-at weekends recycling system; your bullfighting poster; your humorous, though possibly sexist, mugs’
We’re all familiar with Meet The Parents angst. We’ve all been there and suffered. I got off to a bad start, aged 17. Within half an hour of my firstever Meet The Parents lunch, I was caught by my boyfriend’s mother behind the closed larder door, scoffing the remains of pudding. That’s a 10 on the awkward o meter.
In my experience, it doesn’t get much better. Breaking out in a muck sweat during a pub lunch and having to adjourn to the loo to dry my armpits with the hand dryer was certainly up there, and that was 15 years later. So, meeting the parents tops the anxiety list, and then, suddenly, you are the parents being met.
Your children (stepchildren, in my case) are old enough to have boyfriends or girlfriends, and it’s time for you to Meet The Partners. Great! What could be more fun? But, oof, all of a sudden you feel a tiny bit nauseous.
It turns out that Meet The Partners anxiety is on a whole different level. There’s so much more to think about. If they are coming to your house, not just you but your lifestyle is under scrutiny. You don’t want to let down your child by having ibex skins draped over chairs when the new girlfriend is vegan. You don’t want to appear flash by opening a bottle of prosecco but, then again, if you play it down with beer and Aldi crisps, you risk looking not bothered.
There’s all kinds of stuff that could put them off: your mainlyat-weekends recycling system; your bullfighting poster; your humorous, though possibly sexist, mugs; the pre-cut carrot batons (a man-buying mistake but nonetheless that kind of thing can create an indelible impression of sloth, plus a whiff of climate-change denial). Once you’ve woken up to all the possibilities – the many different ways in which you could embarrass them – it’s hard to feel relaxed about the meeting. Then on the day the anxiety snowballs and you may find yourself putting Creedence Clearwater Revival to the back of the album pile, turning photographs of the Boxing Day meet to the wall, actually hiding the jokey tea towel that, on reflection, might seem antifeminist, and panicking about what to wear.
Should you stick to jeans? But if the new girlfriend dresses up, even a bit, won’t that look like a Mean Girls put-down? Should you get a blow dry, just in case? Or will that freak out your stepson, who has only ever seen you make that sort of effort for weddings and job interviews? What is He (the father) going to wear? This has never come up before, but now several of his shirts seem freighted with the wrong sort of message. The pink one looks a bit Philip Green. The white one looks American Psycho clean (it is new). Suddenly, you find yourself wishing you hadn’t thrown away his holey navy sweater because that would have struck the right note. It’s all in the detail.
On the actual night in question, you are micromanaging like Carole Middleton on the wedding day – earnestly discussing the background music (not
Sgt Pepper’s … it’ll look like we’ve bought it for the anniversary) and vetting each other’s topics of conversation. “I don’t think you should bring up the accidental shoplifting story. Or burying the wrong cat. And do not mention how much it cost to lay the fake grass. Or the fight with the neighbours. Or how bored you are with the genderless public lavatories debate.” That sort of thing.
You will be tense, weirdly dressed, half-cut and unable to remember any of the agreed safe subjects by the time the lovebirds turn up, late and nervous because, after all, this is Meet The Parents night.
But they don’t know the half of it.