Popular Wisdom

by Gwen Cooper — August 20, 2007

Sometimes you can't help overhearing other people's conversations--especially when you're on an otherwise-quiet train and a group of girls are rather loudly discussing their own romantic prospects and those of their friends. Such was the situation I found myself in yesterday while returning from a weekend in the Hamptons. It was fairly late and most of the people in my car were either sleeping or quietly reading, but there was one group of girls who kept up a running dialogue from Bridgehampton all the way to Penn Station (roughly 2½ hours, for those of you unfamiliar).

At first, I found it to be more irritating than anything else. As I found myself unable to escape, however, I gleaned some hidden gems from their collective wisdom--a couple of which I reproduce here for you:

"You can't, like, consider yourself his girlfriend if you've never even met his friends."

I'm afraid I had to concur with this one. Apparently, the five or six girls I was traveling with have a seventh friend who's been trying desperately for months to go from "friends with benefits" status to official girlfriend status. This is often a tricky transition, and it can be hard to know what the exact demarcations are that indicate you've arrived. But I think her friends were right. Relationships, like government, thrive best in the sunlight--in other words, out in the open. A guy who's psyched about being with you will want you to meet his friends. He'll want to show you off to them, and he'll probably also, on some level, want to make sure you pass the "hanging with the friends" litmus test. He'll want the reassurance of knowing that his friends also think you're cool, hot, and everything he should aspire to. A guy who keeps you separated from everybody else in his life is a guy who, sad to say, is not thinking of you as being girlfriend material--so you should either accept your benefits or move on with your life.

"If you ask him if the two of you are exclusive, and he's all like, We shouldn't discuss this now while we're drunk, the two of you are so not exclusive!"

Once again, these girls were absolutely right. A guy who wants to make sure you're not dipping your fingers in anybody else's dating pie, as it were, will be the first one to broach the exclusivity subject 90% of the time. A guy who's into a girl will be territorial, and he'll usually take steps to ensure that he's got his dream girl all to himself. Or, sometimes, he'll have already taken it for granted that the two of you are exclusive--so that, when you finally bring it up formally, he'll respond with something like: "Of course we're exclusive!" Then he'll cast a sidelong, vaguely suspicious glance and add, "I'm not seeing anybody else--are you?" But a guy who ducks the question on the grounds of drunkenness, or anything else, is a guy who's trying to avoid the discussion altogether because he knows you won't like his answer. And, in all fairness, what are you doing bringing up such an important discussion while you're drunk in the first place?

There's more--pages and pages of it (because, being a writer, I eventually had to start taking notes)--but we'll have to leave that for another time. Tune in Wednesday for scenes from the life of me, your dating blogger...

Gwen Cooper is the author of Diary of a South Beach Party Girl, recently published by Simon & Schuster. To read all of Gwen Cooper's posts in "The Dating Life," click here.