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It was May Day, and I’d just started dating a guy who was really good friends with an ex-girlfriend. No big deal to me. I’ve got lots of ex-boyfriend friends.
Guy asked if we could be cool, no public displays of affection, etc. at the party we were attending. He didn’t want her to be uncomfortable. He said she still had feelings that he didn’t share. At the time, I really liked and respected her, and I didn’t want her to be uncomfortable either. It seemed like a reasonable request to respect her feelings. I admired their commitment to their friendship. I was so innocent then.
So I spent the day “being cool.� And frequently uncomfortable. Because as the day went on the occasional snuck kiss (not initiated by me; I was following his lead) became a drop of pretense and she was anything but cool. The party ended with her screaming and crying at him at the top of her very drunk lungs on the back porch while I sat shocked and miserable in the kitchen.
“It’s not about you,� one of his friends said.
Yeah, that’s what you want to hear at the beginning of a new relationship: It’s not about you.
Ultimately, that particular incident would be but one of so many bizarre episodes that peppered 5 ½ months of more hell than a girl should reasonably stand, but I am convinced it was the foundation of the dysfunction to come. I definitely feel in retrospect (ah, hindsight!) that I should have walked away from the situation right then.
I’ll tell you one thing for sure: I will never enter a “quiet� relationship again. I think it’s negative and unhealthy and that I deserve better.
It’s tricky because surely there are many understandable reasons to keep a new relationship on the down-low: office romance, pending divorce, children. We all have to make judgment calls for ourselves about what works and what doesn’t for us. And surely some of us are against public displays of affection to such a degree as to make it moot.
But here’s how it works for me: I think a relationship needs support and nurturing, and that support is both internal – between the two partners – and external – within the community of family and friends that surround the couple. The couple has to find out how (and if) they fit with each other and within their communities. A relationship that is out in the open facilitates relationship growth and discovery in both areas at once. A couple dating quiet may not discover their public dynamic until after they are completely entangled internally – making it harder to separate should a problem arise.
More importantly, someone asking you to date quiet is asking you to subvert yourself and your emotions. Asking you not to celebrate publicly the new relationship and not paying you the respect of doing the same. For me, that’s a negative energy I won’t abide again.
And then there’s the why of it. Why are you being asked to date quiet? In my case, I believe it was because he was lying to me (and to her and to all his friends) about the specifics of his situation with both of us. At the very least, it was an indication that he was not free and clear of her emotionally.
I believe the request to keep a new relationship quiet is absolutely a red flag. So while there are understandable reasons why you might enter a quiet relationship, I have to ask: Are the reasons to date quiet actually reasons not to date at all?
Contributing editor Liz Rizzo also blogs at Everyday Goddess and The SexySmart Blog.
