So You’re Bringing A Date to the Club
With temperatures and leaves dropping, it’s time for cuffing season, where individuals oftentimes find themselves compromising their social lives for the mere pleasure of being close to someone as the sun sets early, both on their lives and the day. Cuffing season also brings to the fore the all-too-important question of dating at and within your club, and what the rules and the norms governing them ought to be.
The first is relatively obvious: by no means shall you bring a first date to a club. Never.
There’s something special and sacrosanct about the place you proudly call your second home (and occasionally pay a second mortgage’s worth for). Bringing someone on a first date to your club is glitzy, and not the good sort. It is treacherous to think about doing it only because you come off not as the well-grounded sort of chap you are. Furthermore, it makes you seem attractive transitively and attracts partners who may not look at you for who you are, but rather, for what you portray, and what you possess.
If you don’t really care about that, remember, the awkward first date is perhaps one of the most excruciating experiences you can subject your fellow club cats to. Don’t do it. No. Nah. Nada.
The second is also seemingly simple: don’t play the short game. Read: no hook-ups.
Remember, these are people—your friends and acquiantances—that you see time and time again. Whether you would like to introduce them to someone you’re romantically interested in, but only for a short period of time, or, you would like to transcend the bounds of friendship or a loose connection for a short, fleeting moment of time among your fellow club cats, avoid both impulses rigorously. It makes interactions and socialising awkward, and, after all, it harms your ability to truly enjoy your leisure at your club.
The third is: above board, pukka, at all times.
I sound like a boarding school headmaster. One may blame the folks for that one, but the essential understanding remains at hand: especially in romantic, or, potentially romantic situations, anything you do can and will be held against you. A friend who found himself acting nothing but properly whilst in a romantic relationship with a fellow club cat found that the smallest misstep, innocuous and harmless, did lasting damage to his clubbability and the now-former partner’s friend group ostracised him like a tyrant from a Greek city. Not good. Nope.
The fourth is: wait a month or two.
Don’t rush to introduce a potential date to your club. Wait for a month, make sure that you are in a relationship, and it is going to last, before you even entertain the notion of bringing a romantic partner around for a round.
The fifth is: it’s completely fine if your partner dislikes the club.
Not everyone can be blessed with a club cat as a life partner. In fact, some of the happiest marriages I’ve seen involve two extremes, where one person is an ardent club cat, and needs a club fix through an IV line at all times, and the other simply is thoroughly uninterested. Those relationships are usually fixed through compromise: someone agrees to not remain a club cat past a certain time, let’s say 7PM, and always returns for dinner.
Now that I’ve elucidated the rules, I’m going to give you advice you never asked me for, and it is writ large in my mind: keep your club life and your romantic life at some distance from each other unless you’re already living together. And don’t treat your club as a dating pool.