Practice · Chapter 45

It's your nephew's engagement party. Sixty people. She'll be there — the one. She's been slightly cool with you since a misunderstanding about a hospital visit four years ago that you have gone over approximately nine hundred times.

Do you:

A. Don't go. Say you've got something on. It's easier, and you won't spend the evening with your stomach in a knot. B. Go, and work the whole evening — be extra warm to her, laugh at everything, make sure she sees you helping in the kitchen, and get her on her own at some point to properly clear it up. C. Go, and be pleasant but a bit cool with her. Show her it doesn't bother you. D. Go, say a normal hello to her, and then spend the evening with the people you actually came to see.

WhyA hands her your evening and your nephew's party, and she never even knew she'd been given them. She'll have a lovely time. You'll be at home, checking Facebook at ten past nine.

B is the one most women pick, and it's the exhausting one. Look at what it actually is: a four-hour audition in front of a judge who isn't marking. You'll go home shattered, and — this is the bit that takes years to accept — she will not have shifted an inch, because her feeling about you was never about your performance. It was decided long ago, on the basis of very little, and no amount of kitchen work will reopen it.

C costs you something worse. Cool is a performance too, and it's the one that makes you into the thing you're frightened of becoming. It also gives her something true to say about you, and up to now she's had nothing.

D sounds like: "Hello, you. How've you been?" Two sentences. Warm, brief, absolutely normal. Then you go and find the cousin who makes you laugh.

You'll want to check on her a few times across the evening. That's the old committee looking for its chair. Let it look.

IF SHE COMES TO YOU WITH A DIG

"Well, we don't see much of you these days."
→ "I know. It's been a busy year." (Warm. No apology. No defence.)

"I suppose you've been too busy for the rest of us."
→ "Not too busy. Just busy." (Then, immediately: "How's your Michael getting on?" People will nearly always take an offered subject.)

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