“His family is not your family, if he is wrong they are on his side and if he is right they are on his side. Never vent to your family. They will love you, not him. You will forgive him, they wont.” Never let your friends know when he messes up. You will forget about it, they won’t.”
- anonymous
People almost always fail to realize that when they want to start dating someone, they are going to also end up dating, and even perhaps marrying, that person’s friends and family. I don’t mean that they will do so literally. I do, however, mean it figuratively. The point I am making is when you start a relationship with someone, their friends and family will have something to say about whether or not you are worthy of being in a relationship with them.
You must also take into consideration their extended social network. If you don’t make a favorable impression upon your significant other’s friends and family members, your relationship may be shot down even before it gets off the ground. After all, friends and family of the partners have an influence upon the how the relationship will unfold, and whether it will successful. Again, I’m most people fail to comprehend this reality and only concentrate on making a favorable impression on the person of their interest.
While my friend Paul was in Las Vegas at one of his company’s business excursions, he met a woman named Maria. When he and Maria returned to Denver, they decided to make a go of it. And of course, Paul did everything in his power to impress Maria. He courted her by asking her out on fun dates. He bought her flowers, cards and even chocolate candy. Paul acted like the perfect gentleman. In short, Paul did everything right with Maria and they quickly fell in love with each other.
Although Paul had put in a huge amount of effort in an effort to win Maria over, he never even thought about making the same type of impression on her family and friends. So about five months into their relationship, Maria suggested to Paul that he needed to meet her friends and family.
Her first plan was to have Paul attend one of her family Thanksgiving dinners where he would meet her parents, her sister, and her three brothers. After dinner, she and Paul would go out to a local club where they would be joined by her three best friends; two women and one guy.
In Paul’s mind, he anxiously looked forward to meeting Maria’s family. Maria had told him a plethora of stories about them, and he felt like he already knew them. Maria had also told Paul stories about her best friends Suzi, Becky and Jed. And of course, Paul also felt like he knew so much about them, that once he finally met them, he just figured that he would immediately connect with them and everything would be peachy-keen.
What Paul hadn’t thought about was he was Hispanic and Maria’s family was only one generation from living in Mexico. Paul just figured that Hispanic and Mexican pretty much meant the same thing. Soon enough he would find out how naïve his thinking had been.
When Paul arrived at Maria’s parent’s house, he entered and immediately greeted her parents. Next, Maria took him around the living room area where he met Maria’s sister and three brothers. “Things” between Maria’s family and Paul went well at first. So Paul was confident that he could handle the rest of the day without any problem.
Next, the family announced that it was time to eat dinner. Paul, Maria and her family all took their seats at the dinner table. As soon as the initial appetizer was served, Paul immediately began to eat the food on his plate. But then Maria’s dad asked him to stop eating so that he could say a prayer before eating dinner. Strike one.
Next, the family passed the food serving main food dishes around the table as each person took the requisite food from the dishes and placed them on their individual plates. Paul went along with this tradition and soon found himself faced with eating a chili that he had taken from one of the dishes being passed around the table. Paul had observed Maria’s dad take one of those chilies and casually pop it into his mouth as if the chili was not very hot.
However, when Paul popped the chili into his mouth, his mouth immediately felt like it had caught on fire. The chili was so hot that Paul could barely talk. Sweat began to form on the top of Paul’s head. He then started to act like the hot chili had no affect on him. However, Paul was sweating like a prostitute in church, and Maria’s entire family could clearly see the symptoms written on his face as he belabored every breath he took. Paul had fallen into her dad’s ploy to see whether or not he could handle eating hot chili. After all, being able to handle eating hot chili was gave a male a high social status in Maria’s family. Strike two.
About two years after Paul met Maria, her sister graduated from college. Maria’s parents threw her a graduation party at her parent’s house. Paul made sure he took his boyfriend duties seriously and attended the party. However, when Maria’s aunt served Paul a plate of food that had some hot chili on it, Paul struggled to eat the food on that plate.
Everyone at the party could tell that Paul was having a difficult time eating the hot chili that he had been served. Maria’s sister asked Paul if he was ok eating the chili. Despite obvious evidence to the contrary, Paul replied that he was doing just fine with eating the blazing hot chili. So he told Maria’s sister as much. Maria’s sister could clearly see that Paul was struggling to eat the hot chili. In fact, Paul’s inability to eat hot chili was seen as a knock on his manhood. Thus, Maria’s sister sniped at Paul by teasing him with the comment, “Dude, I think your mouth burns when you eat ketchup.” Strike two and a half.
About a year later, Paul was at Maria’s sister’s house when they were preparing to meet her new boyfriend Samuel. Samuel had made a special trip from Mexico to meet her family and friends. But at this night’s dinner, Maria’s parents were out of town, which meant that Paul would have to serve as “the man of the house.” Having absolutely no clue what he was agreeing to, Paul readily agreed to serve in such a capacity.
When Samuel arrived at the house, the women stayed in the kitchen preparing the meal while Paul was tasked with entertaining Samuel in the living room. As the night went on, and the women were preparing the meal, Paul offered Samuel a few bottles of beer. It seemed that Paul and Samuel were getting along fine until the women told Paul to ask Samuel if he was ready to eat.
Paul wasn’t anywhere near fluent in Spanish and even joked about how he had four years of Spanish One courses. But this time, Paul’s inability to speak Spanish would not serve him well. When the Maria and her sister were finished preparing the meal, they told Paul to ask Samuel if he was ready to eat.
By this time, Paul had drunk about four or five bottles of beer and was feeling buzzed. Thinking he was asking Samuel whether or not he was hungry, Paul asked Samuel, “¿Quieres hombre?” Samuel looked at Paul and suddenly became visibly upset. Translated, “¿Quieres hombre?” meant, “Do you want a man?”
Samuel took Paul’s question to mean that he thought Samuel was gay. After all, Paul had asked Samuel if he wanted a man. From the kitchen, Maria and her sister heard what was happening in the living room and were abhorred with what they heard taking place.
Paul should have asked Samuel, “¿Tienes hambre?” which translates to. “Do you have hunger?” Or, “Are you hungry?” Paul had been buzzed when he asked Samuel the wrong question. So from that moment on, Samuel was skeptical of Paul. Paul soon learned that because he wasn’t proficient in speaking Spanish, it meant that he had no personal social status with the native Spanish-speakers. Strike three.
Paul soon learned that Maria’s family and friends harbored a bit of contempt for him because of the fact that he wasn’t fluent at speaking Spanish. Although Maria had tried her best to stick up for Paul, his inability to speak Spanish had a devastating effect on how Maria’s friends and family viewed him. In effect, since Paul struggled with speaking Spanish, Maria’s friends and family viewed him as “less than.” So Paul would often become the butt of her family and friends’ jokes. This eventually took a toll on their relationship.
During the early 1990s, on a flight from Phoenix to Denver, I met an attractive flight attendant named Stacy. Stacy was a tall blonde with a down-home look about her. She worked for TWA and was based in New York. However, I was able to see her whenever she was off-duty and had a lay-over in Denver.
Stacy and I hit it off and began dating. I was able to visit her whenever she was passing through Denver. Sometimes she would stay at her parents’ house, and other times she would stay at the Double-Tree hotel near Denver Stapleton International Airport.
After about three months of dating, Stacy took me to meet her parent’s house to meet them. I could tell that her mom was ok with us dating, but I sensed that her dad wasn’t so keen with it. So my suspensions were confirmed one time I visited Stacy at her parent’s house.
Stacy had flown in late on a weekday and we met at her parent’s house. She invited me in and I met her mother. Her mother acted inviting and we actually had a pleasant first conversation. That night, however, she snuck me back into her basement bedroom and I spent the night with her.
The next morning, I was relaxing and just lying in bed with Stacy. We could hear her mom telling her dad that she had met me. When Stacy’s dad asked about my race, Stacy’s mom told him that I was Hispanic. Stacy’s dad immediately came unglued upon hearing this and started to rant and rave about what he wanted to do to me. Little did he know that I was downstairs in bed with his daughter listening to his anti-Hispanic rant.
Eventually Stacy’s dad made his way downstairs to her bedroom to confront her about having a Hispanic boyfriend. When I heard his footsteps descending the wooden stairs leading to the basement, I quickly scrambled out of her bed and hid underneath it.
When Stacy’s dad came into her room and confronted her about dating a Hispanic, I was five feet away under her bed listening to the whole conversation. After her dad when back upstairs, I quickly gathered my belongings and managed to sneak out her basement window and managed to arrive safely at my vehicle. Let’s just say that I never went back to Stacy’s parent’s house. Unfortunately, our relationship suffered because of her dad’s racist beliefs. I could never be welcomed as her legitimate boyfriend and thus our relationship soon fizzled out.
When I was a graduate student at Arizona State University, I met a Mexican-American woman named Miranda. She and I immediately hit it off and we quickly agreed to be boyfriend and girlfriend. Little did I know what I was getting into. I was a Hispanic from Denver who had never even been to Mexico. Thus, I had absolutely no clue about Mexican culture. I was about to get a crash course is Mexican culture.
One of the first things that caused conflict in our relationship was the fact that my single mother of five had taught me that a person who cooked a meal shouldn’t be the one who also did the dishes. And because I could barely boil water, I was great at doing dishes.
What I didn’t know was that Miranda had grown up believing it was fine if a woman not only cooked a delicious meal, but that the woman should also clean up the kitchen after dinner. So when I attempted to do the dishes after she cooked a great dinner, Miranda just stood there confused, looking at me as I made a watery mess while I did the dishes. The next time I tried to do the dished after dinner, she told me that I was just making a huge mess and ordered me to go to the living room and to relax and watch TV.
Since I had grown up under my mom’s rules, I wasn’t comfortable eating and then going to relax while Miranda not only cooked the meal, but did the dishes as well. So she and I butted heads until I learned that it was easier to just let her do the dishes to avoid the drama she would cause if I attempted to do the dishes.
Miranda eventually invited me to go meet her parents and family. We traveled to a nearby city and ate a great meal. However, after dinner, all of the females (no matter their age) stayed in the kitchen and either cleaned it, or began preparing the next meal. These women stayed in that kitchen all day serving us men. I figured that I had to do something about this unfair situation.
The next day after lunch, I went into the hot kitchen and tried to tell the women in Spanish that since they had cooked the meal, I was going to do the dishes. These women couldn’t speak English very well, but they sure knew shat I was offering to do for them. I began to wash the dishes. I then dried them with a dish towel and put them away.
Not long after this, Miranda’s grandma went to the living room and started telling telling the men that since I was willing to help the women in the kitchen, that they should also help out with the kitchen chores. One of Miranda’s uncle’s came into the kitchen and barked at me, “I don’t know who you are, or where you came from, but we do stuff differently here. Next time just grab a beer and chill in the living room like the rest of the men.” Let’s just say I didn’t impress Miranda’s family that day. In fact, I probably embarrassed her.
A Family Christmas in Arizona
When I first arrived to the city of Phoenix, Arizona to attend graduate school, it was in the middle of a brutally hot monsoon season. The average daytime temperatures hovered near 110 degrees. There were certain ways people had learned to deal with such torrid, humid heat, but I hadn’t yet learned about them. It would take me a couple of summers to learn these heat-busting strategies. But soon thereafter, I also experienced my first Christmas in the desert; which was also a learning experience. At first it was weird to see Christmas lights on a cactus. But one thing I did learn: I surely didn’t miss the brutal cold of a Colorado Christmas. I remember telling myself that although I though the sights of a desert Christmas would take some getting used to, I surely could get used to a seventy-degree Christmas day.
After returning to Denver for two successive cold Christmases, I decided that I had to find a way to stay in Phoenix for the holidays. However, I had never spent a Christmas holiday away from my family since military days. I accomplished my goal by inviting my entire family to spend Christmas in the comfortable December weather. In fact, that’s how I sold them on the idea.
I knew that my family hated the cold weather, but I also knew that they enjoyed getting together as a family during the various holidays. After all, this was an enduring Hispanic tradition. So, well before the holiday season even started, I began sending my family a plethora of pictures of the activities I had participated in during the later months of the year. In those pictures, they saw me dressed in shorts and t-shirts while engaged in numerous outdoor activities.
The next time I was back in Denver for my mom’s September birthday, I sprung the idea of a family Christmas spent in warm Phoenix, Arizona on my unsuspecting family. My plan had worked! My family agreed to make the long trip to Phoenix for the upcoming Christmas holiday. I was beyond elated that I would be staying in the warm weather for Christmas.
The thing I didn’t realize, however, was that I would be inviting people from two slightly different versions of Hispanic culture. My mom had raised us to believe that it wasn’t the women’s duty to constantly serve their men at every turn. Not to mention, my girlfriend’s family would be interacting with my family without having really met each other. Some members of each of the families had spoken on the phone to one another, but the families hadn’t actually spent any length of time together. So that fact planted itself in the back of my brain and slowly continued to grow.
My family arrived in Phoenix a couple of days before Christmas day. And just as I predicted, they were elated to experience seventy-degree days rather than the frigid Colorado weather. However, I would soon learn that my family wasn’t so familiar with the traditional Hispanic culture that guided my girlfriend and her family and relatives.
After I told my girlfriend’s family that my family was coming to Phoenix for Christmas, her extended family got excited at the prospect and looked forward to attending the holiday festivities. We all agreed that the venue for the holiday celebration would take place at my house. What I also hadn’t foreseen was that if anything went wrong, I would be caught square in the middle of the family drama.
Well, let’s just say family drama was in the cards. First, my girlfriend, her sister and her mom spent all morning preparing the Christmas meal. And if you know anything about a Hispanic holiday, there is a lot of food to prepare and then eat. In fact, my girlfriend’s family had prepared so much food, that it took up all the space on the countertops and on the main kitchen table. All the attendees had to eat on folding tables that we covered with festive holiday table cloths.
Second, about twelve of my family members had made the trip, so most of them had rented a few rooms at a nearby hotel. As the time to eat approached, almost none of my family members had yet to arrive at my house. In fact, they were still MIA forty-five minutes after the time we had agreed to eat. Thus, my girlfriend’s family began to get anxious about the situation. Out of concern, I made several calls to see what was causing the delay, but my family is notorious for not answering their phones when they are guilty of something.
After the call produced no information about the ETA of my family, my girlfriend and her family announced that they were going to go ahead and start eating. When I asked why they weren’t going to wait until my family arrived, my girlfriend said, “We didn’t slave over a hot stove all morning to eat cold food.” She did have a point. Somehow I managed to convince my girlfriend’s family to wait just a little longer, hoping that I could buy some time, and that everything would work itself out without causing any unnecessary drama.
My brother is usually the person that arrives late for everything. My family had always said that he would be late for his own funeral. But what I hadn’t seen coming was the fact that when my family arrived about an hour late, they were upset that my girlfriend’s family hadn’t waited for them to arrive before starting to eat. Because I knew both families, I completely understood the reasoning behind of each of their arguments. Nevertheless, my family became upset. And when my family got upset, my girlfriend’s family got upset at the fact that my family had gotten upset with them.
Remember how I mentioned that if anything went wrong, I would be caught square in the middle of the family drama? Well just as I predicted, I ended up being caught in the middle of both families’ drama. So in order to prevent the drama from escalading any further, as soon as my family’s butts hit their seats, my girlfriend announced that dinner was served.
In a traditional Hispanic gathering, the man of the house is usually seated at the head of the table. My mom and her husband were seated in the first two chairs to my left. After my girlfriend announced that the food was ready, she made her way from the kitchen and stood to my right and asked me, “Babe, what type of food would you like me to serve you?” Uh-oh! I just knew that her question was going to cause a reaction from my mom. I just didn’t know exactly what to expect.
After my mom heard my girlfriend ask me this, she looked down, bent over and moved the tablecloth out of the way so that she could see my legs. While still looking down and holding the tablecloth, she said, “I don’t see that you have any broken legs.” This was a passive-aggressive question directed at my girlfriend. It was a way for my mom to tell my girlfriend that she didn’t agree with a woman thinking that she had to serve a man. After all, my mom had raised her boys to fend for themselves; including preparing their won plates during meals. My girlfriend didn’t appreciate such a comment and retorted, “Oh, it’s okay, I enjoy serving my man.” She then confidently went off and prepared me a plate of food.
Needless to say, my mom was infuriated! She quickly began not-so-quietly lecturing me about how I was abusing “such a young girl.” And my mom had used the word “girl” on purpose. She had done so to take yet another jab at my girlfriend. My mom’s comment was meant to imply that my girlfriend wasn’t mature enough to realize that she didn’t have to act as my personal servant.
The rest of the dinner was pleasant, but somewhat tense. About an hour after dinner, my mom and her husband announced that they were tired and that they were going to go back to their hotel room to relax. I knew my mom, and I knew that she had watched her watch and had planned to leave as a protest against the way my girlfriend and I had acted. After all, my mom had raised all of her boys to act contrary to the Hispanic tradition that had women serving their men.
The next morning my mom and her husband decided to fly back to Colorado. Later that afternoon my mom called me to let me know that she and her husband had arrived safely back in Denver. But she couldn’t resist taking one last jab at me; especially about how I treated my girlfriend. Right before she ended the phone conversation, she said, “I don’t agree with how you’re taking advantage of that young girl. You should know better.” I would even bet that my mom had placed that call as soon as she walked into her house. I imagine that she hadn’t even taken off her winter jacket before she placed that call. I also knew that it was useless to argue with her. So I just said, “Okay, mom. I hear you.” And we ended the call.
I probably don’t have to tell you that my family never returned to Phoenix for another Christmas. Moreover, after that experience, my mom and my girlfriend never really got along in any meaningful way. In the long run, this unfortunate dynamic between them really didn’t affect me so much. Because my girlfriend and I lived a thousand miles away from Denver, we didn’t spend much time together interacting with my mom. For the rest of our relationship, I would fly to Denver for Christmas without my girlfriend.
Buy All the Girls a Flower. But I Only Have a Crush On Julie.
During our high school years, my friends Chris, Ken and I made one of our normal Saturday trips to the Villa Italia mall near where we all lived. As high school teenagers, we didn’t necessarily have any plan about what we would do once we got there, we just wanted to hang out at the mall and see what would happen once we got there. As per our regular trips to that mall, my friends and I just liked to roam and window shop. Since we all came from families of limited resources, we really couldn’t afford to purchase much of anything. So we would window shop and see what items were popular: things that we couldn’t afford. It seemed like whenever we roamed the “Villa,” as we called it, we never knew who we would run into. Well, that day we happened to run into our friend Renee and her two friends Joy and Julie.
When we happened to run into Renee and her friends, Chris, Ken and I were headed to the food court to get something to eat. That was the place where all the teenagers congregated; the ones who happened to find themselves in similar circumstances. That is, they had no money, yet they wanted to be seen.
At the time, I knew that my friend Chris had a crush on Renee’s friend Julie. So I decide that it would be a good idea to invite Renee and her friends to join us on our journey to the food court. I figured that we could all slowly meander toward the food court, which meant that Chris would have plenty of time to interact with Julie and perhaps even flirt with her. I was elated when Renee and her friends agreed to accompany us to the food court.
As our group was leisurely making our way toward the mall’s food court, we happened to walk by a flower shop. Renee and her friends started to get animated and began to make comments about how cool it would be if a guy would buy them some flowers. I took this as a thinly veiled hint to us guys.
The girls quickly asked if we could all go into the flower shop. When Renee asked me point blank whether or not we wanted to go into the flower shop, I promptly agreed. Again, I saw it as a chance for Chris to flirt with Julie. There was no way I could pre-gauge what Chris wanted to do. So I strongly suggested to my friends that we should accompany the girls into the flower shop. Although they gave me the “I don’t know why you are asking this of us” look, they did in fact agree to enter the flower shop.
Once our mixed group was inside the flower shop, almost immediately, Renee and her friends started to comment about how cool some of the flower arrangements were. Renee was the first to comment, “Look how cool these flower arrangements are! Wouldn’t it be cool if someone bought me one of these?”
Upon hearing the Renee’s comment, my friend Chris looked at the price tag on one of the flower arrangements. When Chris realized how much these flower arrangements cost, he blurted out, “Man, who would be stupid enough to spend this much money on stupid flowers?” After hearing Chris’s rude comment, I nudged him in his ribs and quietly told him to be quiet. No only did I attempt to silence him from making anymore impolite comments about the cost of the flowers, I even suggested that he buy a flower for not only Julie, but also suggested that he buy a flower for all three of the girls in the group. Being the cheapskate that Chris was known to be, he told to me that he had a crush on Julie and not any of her friends.
I told him that I realized this, but I still strongly suggested that he buy a flower for all three girls in the group. I didn’t have the chance to explain why I was telling him to buy all of the girls a flower. Had I attempted to give him the details behind the logic of why I was suggesting that he buy all three girls a flower, it was likely that one or more of the girls would overhear me.
Chris still didn’t understand what I was getting at and adamantly said, “Why would any guy pay these ridiculous prices for flowers?” Again I nudged him hard in his ribs and told him to lower his voice. I didn’t want any of the girls in the group to hear him making such comments, and to then have Chris come off looking like a cheapskate.
Chris continued to give me some passive-aggressive pushback about purchasing the flowers. And again, I told him to just quit being a cheapskate and to buy three flowers. Being the stubborn guy he was, Chris again quietly quipped that he didn’t have a crush on all three of the girls, but only wanted to impress Julie. I then told him that the reason he should buy all three girls a flower was because the other two girls in the group were Julie’s good friends. Chris was still confused about what I was trying to tell him. It was at that moment when I realized that I had to tell him why he still had to buy all the girls in the group a flower.
I pulled Chris over into one of the isles furthest away from where the girls were and quickly explained to Chris that he had to buy all three of the girls a flower. I told him that if he only bought Julie a flower, she would be impressed with him, but perhaps Julie’s two friends wouldn’t be. After all, if they didn’t receive a flower themselves, they would likely feel jealous of Julie receiving a flower.
I went on to tell Chris that when we left the girl’s company, Julie’s friends would have a say about how they perceived him. I told him that if, after we left, he failed to buy all three of the girls a flower, Julie’s friends would feel left out because they didn’t receive a flower themselves.
On the other hand, if Chris bought a flower for all three of the girls, then when we left their company, instead of feeling jealous about not having received a flower from Chris, Julie’s friends would instead comment about how considerate and cool he was for buying all of the girls a flower. In short, if Chris failed to buy Julie’s friends a flower, then they would be impressed for her. But if Chris bought them all a flower, then they would tell Julie how awesome and considerate Chris was. In other words, instead of being jealous about Julie being the only one to receive a flower from Chris, they would all comment how nice he was, and would thus encourage Julie to date such a nice and considerate guy.
Cheapskate Chris ultimately ended up buying all three girls a flower. And of course, Renee’s friends were both impressed with Chris and ended up encouraging Julie to date him. In the long run, Chris never quite understood the logic of buying all three girls a flower. However, he was happy that Julie had agreed to go out with him. In the end, I was glad that Chris listened to me and had come off looking like a good guy. Chris never quite understood the logic behind my recommendation to buy all three of the girls a flower. However, the mission I had set out to accomplish ended up being successful. That is, I felt glad that I could say, “Mission accomplished!”
