Meeting His Family Without Losing Your Will to Live

Dear Priscilla,

The man I've been seeing for about four months just invited me to his family's Fourth of July barbecue. His whole extended family will be there — parents, siblings, some uncle who apparently makes his own hot sauce and takes it personally if you don't try it. I don't know what to bring, I don't know how much affection to show him in front of his mother, and I genuinely don't know what happens if the hot sauce uncle decides he doesn't like me. Is there a survivable way to do this? Some kind of rule I'm missing?

— Brian, Tulsa, Oklahoma

A lovely question, Brian. It reminds me of the summer of 1999, when I too believed that a potato salad and a good attitude could save a relationship. They cannot. Nothing can. But I am getting ahead of myself, and ahead of you, and you deserve better than to be rushed toward the abyss the way I was.

Bring a potato salad. Not because it will help — nothing helps — but because it gives your hands something to do besides shake. I learned this the hard way at the Whitlock family reunion in the summer of '99, when I arrived at a lakeside pavilion in Door County, Wisconsin, on the arm of a man named Desmond who had told me, and I quote, "my family is going to love you." What Desmond failed to mention was that his family already loved someone. Her name was Patrice. She was also at the reunion. She had also been invited by Desmond. She had also brought a potato salad, and hers, I will say once and never again, had dill in it, which was an unfair advantage I am still not over.

Do not make my mistake, Brian. When you arrive at that barbecue, you scan the perimeter first. You count the coolers. You ask yourself: is there a second potato salad here that should not exist? Because if there is, someone has been living two lives, and one of those lives is about to become a folding chair with your name mentally assigned to it, unoccupied, while everyone else eats corn.

I want to be clear that I do not think your situation is like mine. Yours sounds sweeter — a hot sauce uncle, some nerves, ordinary stakes. Mine involved Desmond announcing, over a plate of ribs, that he "hadn't found the right moment" to mention Patrice, as though a moment simply hadn't presented itself in the four years they'd apparently been on and off. I want you to have your soft, easy version of this day. I want the uncle to like you. I want you to feel, for one afternoon, that families can be entered gently, like a warm pool, rather than the way I entered the Whitlock family, which was more like being pushed off a dock in your church clothes.

As for how much affection to show him in front of his mother — none. I don't mean that as advice so much as a policy I've come to hold generally, about affection, and mothers, and rooms with more than four people in them. But if you must show some, a hand on the forearm reads as devoted without reading as a hostage situation, which is more than I can say for the anniversary I spent at a Renaissance faire with a falconer named Corwin in 2003, who introduced me to his mother as "my current one," said with the same tone you'd use for a rental car. His mother nodded like this was a category she was already familiar with. I have never eaten a turkey leg since without wondering how many "current ones" preceded me, or what happened to them, or whether any of them saw it coming the way I so clearly did not.

I should mention that Corwin also left me at a housewarming party in 2007, for a woman he'd met at the same falconry demonstration circuit, which I recognize does not entirely square with the timeline of the Renaissance faire in 2003, since by most calculations that would put us together for four full years, and I want to assure you that it was not four years, it was closer to a summer, though certain summers of mine have stretched themselves out in memory until they cover entire administrations. The point stands regardless: never trust a man who owns his own falconry glove. It is not a hobby. It is a warning label shaped like a hobby.

The uncle and his hot sauce, I suspect, are the easy part of your day. Try the hot sauce. Say something specific and kind about it — "this has real heat, but it builds" is a sentence that has never once failed me, and I have used it about hot sauce, coworkers, and a man named Terrence who I will not get into today except to say that he described himself the exact same way, and I should have listened, because with Terrence, too, it built. It built for three years and then it built its way directly into my cousin's guest bathroom, which is a story for a different letter, on a different day, when I have more strength.

What matters, Brian, is that you go into this barbecue believing the best of everyone, the way I once did, while also quietly identifying every exit. This is not a contradiction. This is wisdom. I want you to enjoy the corn. I want you to let his mother tell you the story about him as a child getting stuck in a tire swing, and I want you to laugh at the right moments, and I want you, at the same time, to notice where the cars are parked, in what order, and whether any of them belong to a Patrice you haven't met yet.

I no longer attend barbecues. I want to be honest with you about that, because I think honesty is the least I owe a reader as sincere as you. I have not attended a shared outdoor gathering involving a grill since the Obama administration. What I have instead is a modest property with a shallow decorative moat, three names I use interchangeably depending on who is asking, and a bearded dragon named Nathaniel who has never once introduced me to anyone as "his current one" and never will, because reptiles, whatever their other limitations, do not lie about who they are seeing. This is not loneliness, Brian. I want to be very clear about that, because I know how it might look from the outside, a woman alone with a lizard and a small moat, refusing corn on principle. It is not loneliness. It is architecture. It is the shape a life takes once it has learned exactly what it is protecting itself from.

So bring the potato salad. Skip the dill, out of respect for a wound that is not yours. Try the hot sauce, watch the coolers, and go easy on the forearm touching. And know that if you take nothing else from me today, take this: I built a moat so that you wouldn't have to. Learn from what happened to me at that lake, at that faire, in that guest bathroom, and you will get to keep the barbecues, and the uncle, and maybe even the man who invited you to them — which, I promise you, Brian, is a happier ending than the one I found, and proof enough that this advice works.

— Priscilla