It's Debbie Downer

by Nicholas Allen — August 21, 2007

My Saturday night date with Patricia turned into a weekend on the Jersey shore. One of my best friends has a huge house out there and invited the two of us and several other couples to come out for what turned into a weekend-long house party.

I'll get around to telling you about what it was like for Patricia and me to share a bedroom for the first time (always a crucial step in a new relationship), but I couldn't let a description of the weekend go by without commenting on my fellow blogger, Gwen Cooper's, observation that you can't really consider yourself a guy's girlfriend until you've met his friends. Because one of our friends also brought his new lady friend, and it turned out to be a mistake of monumental proportions.

Far be it for me to suggest that a woman should be "on her best behavior," or anything as vaguely condescending-sounding as that, when she meets a guy's friends for the first time. But, male or female, if you don't go into the situation without at least the idea of trying to make a good first impression, then I think you have to ask yourself what you're in it for. Every guy knows that one of the best ways to impress a girl you like is to impress her friends. That way, you can let them do half the work for you, confident in the knowledge that even when you're not around to dazzle the girl yourself, her friends will point out all your good qualities and generally "talk you up" to her. It effectively allows you to be in two places at once when it comes to cementing a good impression in your dream girl's mind.

And the same certainly holds true in the reverse situation. Guys talk to each other about the girls they're seeing, and if one of our friends is seeing a woman we find particularly spectacular--believe me when I say we will make him aware of his good fortune.

So it's hard for me to know what my friend Gary was thinking when he brought his awful new girlfriend, Melissa, into our midst this weekend. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that it's hard to know what Melissa was thinking. Perhaps she was looking for a way to break up with Gary but lacked the courage to grab the breakup by the horns and do it herself. Maybe she's just a miserable person by nature and couldn't help herself. All I can tell you is that she spent the entire weekend with a look on her face like she'd just swallowed a bug. Dipped in feces. Flavored with strongly sour lemons. I guess "sourpuss" is the image I'm trying to convey here.

The girl didn't crack a smile the entire weekend although, to her credit, she did make it impossible for the rest of us to smile in her presence. When she wasn't busy not-smiling and generally looking irritated, she was complaining about the food we served (tuna, salmon, steak, hamburgers, chicken, grilled vegetables--"Don't you have anything not grilled?" she asked at what was originally planned as a cookout), the bar we went to after dinner ("Isn't there anyplace less crowded we could go?"), the games we played when we got home ("Board games are stupid," she announced when we broke out Trivial Pursuit), and every story that anybody in the room told ("That's not funny at all," she would announce after each attempt to tell a humorous anecdote).

It was like spending the weekend with an angry Debbie Downer.

Like I said, none of us can figure out what Gary's thinking--not so much why he brought this girl around, but why he's dating her in the first place. Although, given how strongly we're now avoiding him--for fear he'll ask us, "So what did you guys think of Melissa" and we'll have to actually tell him--we may never know for sure.

This could be bad. I may not end up speaking to Gary again until I get his Christmas card this year. If Melissa's picture isn't on it, I guess I'll know it's safe to call him again.

Nicholas Allen is a writer and columnist based in Manhattan. To read all of his blogs, click here.