ADVICE GODDESS: Social Climber
- Details
—The Girlfriend
Perhaps you could do more to let these blue bloods know how much you and they have in common. Maybe mention how you learned the ABCs of diplomacy from your father’s work at the Embassy (Suites Hotel, where he’s the night manager). Share how you felt the day you discovered that you, too, are an heiress, as your father waved his hand over the family holdings, proclaiming, “Someday, this will all be yours.” Unfortunately, he wasn’t gesturing at the homes, the cars, the yachts, but at the boxes of crap piled up in the basement.
If that campaign doesn’t get you in, you might take a lesson from the society stiffs — those who made their money the old-fashioned way, by inheriting it from their robber baron ancestors — and stop trying so hard. You’ve already asked, watched, waited, avoided analysis; you’ve pretty much done everything short of enrolling in suck-up lessons at the community college. Yet, a year later, your boyfriend’s still trotting off solo to society events, leaving you to wait home on the foyer rug like the family dog. (Some girls get into the society pages, some just go on them.)
Your real problem is your failure to be difficult. I’m not suggesting you start flying around your relationship on a broom, but that you become somebody who couldn’t fathom trying to “cope” with a guy who balks at presenting her to Mummy, Daddy and the drunk trust-fund uncles. Tell your boyfriend “I don’t date guys who don’t feel they can bring me around.” And be willing to walk away. Don’t just get behind the idea of that; be a girl who needs her dignity more than she needs a boyfriend. This should eliminate the need for icky conversations about how you’d like to be treated. Instead, you’ll communicate it from the start, from within: Oh, what’s that? They don’t want my sort around? Well, who wants them? My family got an engraved invitation to be here, right on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor; your huddled masses yearning to breathe free...” Nowhere does it say “Give me your stuck-up snots, your country club masses in scary-ugly golf pants yearning to get everything for free...”