ASK SHIRLEY
Ask Shirley, December
This week Shirley helps you lie to your parents, reject a civil partnership proposal and win friends and/or influence people!
Dear Shirley, I met my boyfriend on squirt.org. How do I explain that to my parents?
Everyone wants to tell their friends and family a lovely romantic story about how they met the love of their life. Sadly, not everyone's love story is fit to be turned into a Hollywood blockbuster starring Ryan Gosling and Who Cares.
The truth is most people meet each other in dull, unromantic situations, like Mother on a Saturday night or at work in the Call Centre over a shared desk and an Americano. Even more tedious is the fact that love sometimes grows from long-lasting friendship rather than at first sight. Have you never seen the Barry's Tea ad, for fuck's sake?
My tip is to ignore the facts. If you want to tell your parents a story that they'll enjoy, make one up. Just be sure that your boyfriend is in on the act...
Dear Shirley, when my boyfriend asked me to civil partner him, I got caught up in the moment and said yes. However, I actually meant to say no. Now what do I do?
As we all know, Traditional Marriage and its plainer, uglier sister, Civil Partnership, are simply contracts.
When you buy a pair of Victoria Beckham Jeans in Brown Thomas, that's a contract too! And if you buy a pair of Victoria Beckham Jeans in Brown Thomas for €300, you might bring them home and be told by your other half that you look like a fat cow in them and that money could have been spent on something much better with Christmas is coming up and then there's that wedding in January too and, sure, you can get jeans exactly like that, but for cheaper, in Top Shop. And then you feel like an impulsive, selfish whore... but it's too late!
You see, once you have entered into a sales contract, you can only get out of it if the goods are defective. As I have not slept with your boyfriend (yet), I cannot say if you have that option. What I can tell you is that with more important contracts, there is something called a "cooling off" period. That is a period just after the agreement, where you can legally change your mind. It's like a safety net for indecisive queens like you. Normally, the cooling-off period is for 7 days unless he proposed to you online, in which case you'd have 30 days. If you've left it longer than that, I am afraid you have to go through with it. Enjoy your life.
Of course, if you want to be "illegal", you could just tell your boyfriend that you've always wanted a huge wedding and that you'll both need to save up for a few years for it and hope that he eventually forgets. That worked for an aunt of mine. But then again, she was living in a nursing home and her fiancé had Alzheimers.
Dear Shirley, how do you win friends and influence people?
I think of all relationships like roses. You need to tend to them carefully and only then they will produce "the goods". Sometimes it is even appropriate to dump your shit on them... but remember, roses only bloom for a short period. The rest of the time, it's hard work. And a bit of smart pruning!
You see, the key to influence is not how many friends you have but how powerful they are. Any loser can spend a month or so online, turning 140,000 random strangers into facebook friends. However, few of these so-called friends would every help out in any meaningful way. What you need are a few good friends in high places. And no, I don't mean Padre Pio.
Work out where you want to have influence, who the key players are and find some way to way to earn their gratitude. Like the Celtic Tiger property developers, I find that money usually helps. But if you had money, you wouldn't be whinging about friends and influence now, would you?