The Mandates by Dave Singleton Page A

spending a dime? There are few advantages to a gay relationship. Access to a larger selection of fine attire is chief among them.
    Find a man within a couple of inches of yourself from all angles. Try to vary the hair color so you don’t look like frosted twins, because who wants to look like Ken and Ken sans Barbie out for the evening? But keep the clothes all in the family. It’s one of your inalienable gay rights.

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    MEETING HIS FRIENDS: THE ULTIMATE CORPORATE MERGER

    Meeting his friends requires major strategic planning, just like a corporate merger. It will take time and research and cannot be accomplished with any valid rate of success within the first three months of dating. You need to know the players, understand their roles, respect the power hierarchy, and set a realistic two-year time plan for those friends you are targeting for early retirement, downsizing, and transfers.
    It’s a common misconception that your single friends are just dying to see you happily dating, coupled, or married off. Maybe not so surprising is that a few of his single friends may not want him happily dating, coupled, or married off, either. He may not be aware of this. That’s why you have to be smart enough for both of you when it comes to managing friends, his and yours.
    The truth is that sometimes you don’t realize who your real friends are, or what you need in a friend, until a dating relationship comes along to challenge those friendship dynamics.
    When I was thirty-two, it dawned on me that several of my so-called friends seemed to go out of their way to sabotage my dating relationships. Whether the sabotage was excluding the new guy from conversations or bending his ear with inappropriate information about my past or pointedly not inviting him to social functions, I realized that these so-called friends didn’t want me to date anyone more than once or twice. It was too threatening to them.
    At first I didn’t believe it. Surely, people who supposedly cared about me wanted me to be happy. I remember introducing Karl, who became my long-term boyfriend, to a group of friends at a restaurant in the West Village of New York City. These friends drank like fishes, told stupid tales of youthful indiscretions, brought up bad former relationships I’d been in, and asked Karl and me inappropriate sexual questions about our still-forming relationship. Karl was stunned. I was like Glenn Close in the film
Jagged Edge.
In the film, she can’t believe that Jeff Bridges wants to kill her, and I couldn’t believe my friends were trying to kill my relationship. Glenn finally had her “typewriter” meltdown, the moment where she realized that Jeff was indeed the killer. And I had my moment when I realized that some of my friends were killers, too, and confronted them. Actually, a couple of them needed an exorcist more than a confrontation, but that’s beside the point. The damage was already done.
    You should be aware of his friends’ reaction to you, and your friends’ reaction to him. You need to know the different rules for meeting his friends versus meeting your friends.
    The Mandates
approach to meeting and managing
your
friends is as follows:
    Control the environment. You pick the place to meet, somewhere where you know you’ll all be comfortable, where the conversation will flow without your having to shout above the noisy crowd. One of the first rules of public relations is to never take a client anywhere you haven’t been before. You don’t want any surprises on a first meeting.
    Choose the first few friends carefully. For the first meeting, invite only those friends with whom you feel truly close. Forgo that new guy who’s really, really fun but a bit of a wild card. And don’t invite an entire social group. Keep it small and intimate; you want the meeting to be cozy.
    Relax! Dogs smell fear. Don’t worry about the planning and organizing to the extent