BAD ADVICE FOR GOOD PEOPLE TO IGNORE

Bad advice usually isn’t life threatening, it just feels like it at first.

When it comes from the right person, we follow the advice, good or bad.

That habit comes from years of training at the school of ‘Do As I Say, Not As I Do.’

Some bad advice too many followed, are following, will soon follow:

Couples Advice:

With all couples, the big question comes up eventually, and it’s not popping The Question.

At some time one will ask, “When do I get to meet your parents?”

That’s it, the big question.

I was on a double date once, sitting in the back seat with a nice girl. It was our first date.

I knew the guy driving. The girl in the front seat had been going out with him a few months. They liked each other.

“When will you introduce me to your parents,” she said. “I’m really looking forward to meeting them.”

I’d call her bubbly.

Normal enough for a dating couple, and sort of an encouraging thing for a first date couple to hear. Relationship progress is always exciting to be around. It feels like looking into the future.

“I should have said something earlier,” the driver said. “My parents died three years ago in an airplane crash.”

“I’m so sorry,” his date said, without bubble.

I was sorry, too. I’d met his parents a few times since I knew the guy. They lived a couple of miles out of town.

Later that night after dropping the girls off I asked about it. Why would a guy say something like that.

“I don’t know. I ran out of good answers. What am I supposed to say if I don’t want every girl I date to meet my parents?”

“It’s happened before?”

“So far my parents have died in a plane crash, been lost at sea, disappeared in the jungle. I need more ideas.”

“Here’s an idea, tell the truth.”

“That I don’t think my dates are worthy of meeting my parents? I can’t do that.”

“You don’t have to kill them every time. Why not say you were thinking the same thing, then never bring it up again and change the subject whenever they bring it up.”

“That’s great. Did you just think of that?”

“No, but that’s what normal people do. Or tell the truth. I mean, do you really think they care if they meet your parents? Do your parents care? Part of saying they’d like to meet your parents is polite small talk.”

“What’s the other part?”

“The other part is landing you. You’ve been dating, so you’re on the hook. Meeting the parents is setting the hook deeper.”

“Sounds fishy.”

Bad Advice For Meeting The Parents The First Time

“I want you to meet my parents,” is a whole other deal with a whole slew of bad advice, starting with, Be Sure What You Ask For.

I’ve met the parents, more parents than I wanted to meet. It’s not something I’ve ever looked forward to, or something I’ve ever asked.

How many men out there have asked to meet their girlfriend’s parents?

I’ve met moms and dads, divorced moms and divorced dads, step moms and step dads, widowed moms and widower dads. Am I leaving anyone out?

But, I’d never met anyone like my eventual father in law. When I did, he took me aside and said, “You may sleep with her where you come from, but not here because that would make her a whore, this a whorehouse, me a pimp, and her mother a madam. Do you get me? Are we clear?”

Message acknowledged, over and out.

The next few days were full of Big Daddy’s life exploits.

He’d been a fighter pilot in WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. He was shot down in every war and taken to prison, where he escaped every time.

He named the islands he swam between in the Pacific, his transfer from Korea to China, and his stay in the Hanoi Hilton.

From 1943 on he’d driven every car and truck ever made, flew every airplane that left the ground, and done every job listed.

He built his first airplane in a barn when he was thirteen. He could listen to jets fly overhead and tell what the engine from the sound it made.

It was the most incredible avalanche of bulls!t I’d heard before or since.

I nodded my head to show I was an active listener. On the long drive home I broke it down to my future wife.

She was not amused. At first. Then we clicked. We decided he made his life better with his stories, made her mom’s life better for believing it.

But we didn’t have to go along. That’s when I thought of the long term. We started making up the sort of stories we’d tell when we got old.

It was a revelation of joy.. Now we’re older than her parents were when I first met them. And we’re letting it fly.

Are you letting fly, too?