March 13, 2012 | 5:12 pm

Meet the Friends

Posted by Tamara Shayne Kagel

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When your boyfriend meets your friends for the first time, it can be almost as nerve-wracking as meeting the parents.  Although my boyfriend of a year knows and has built relationships with all my friends in LA, I have a lot of friends in other places.  This past weekend we went to New York together where a ton of my college girlfriends live.  It was his first time meeting them and the same was true for me and a few of his friends so the pressure was on. .

Unlike your local friends, your long-distance friends get many less chances to build relationships with your boyfriend.  If he makes a bad first impression on a local friend, he has plenty of weekends up coming for him to win them over.  But this past weekend, he had one or two chances at the most to get along with some of the people who are most important to me.  He probably won’t see them again till the next wedding and that doesn’t look like it’s happening for a while, so naturally I was stressed about things going well.

Based on our trip this weekend, here are some suggestions the next time you’re bringing your significant other along to meet your long-distance friends.

1. Don’t Have the First Big Fight of Your Relationship the Day Before Because You Don’t Get Exactly What You Want.

2. Don’t Get More Drunk Than He Has Ever Seen You in Your Entire Relationship.

3. Don’t Get Sick From Drinking For the First Time in Three Years and Have to Cancel Brunch With His Friends.

4. Don’t Spill Red Wine All Over Yourself at Your Friends Apartment So That You Have to Borrow Her Clothes and Then Spill Water Again Later on Her Floor.

5. Ask Your Friends Ahead of Time Not to Tell the Most Embarrassing Story From College About You On New Year’s Eve 2004.

6. Don’t Make Him Listen to a Trivia Game Your Friends Wrote in the Summer of 2003 That Has Questions About Who Lost Their Virginity To Whom.

7. Don’t Cry the Day You Identify A Potential First Grey Hair and Beg Him to Pull It Out.

8. Don’t See the Masterful Cindy Sherman Exhibit on Female Aging at Moma the Day After You Identify A Potential First Grey Hair.

9. Don’t Correct Him When He Says Blogger Instead of Writer to His Friends.

10. Don’t Spend A Long Time Singing Different Sorority Songs to Each Other.

But if all of that happens, and your friends still tell you they really like him, perhaps you’ll calm down about it all the next time he’s meeting the friends.

Tamara Shayne Kagel is a writer living in Santa Monica, CA. To find out more about her, visit www.tamarashaynekagel.com and follow her on twitter @tamaraskagel. © Copyright 2011.