The second thing that people want to toss aside when they fall madly in love is etiquette. They can't wait to be free of it, casting it all in a heap on the floor while they attend to what they believe to be the more urgent needs of passion.
Miss Manners is shocked. Wait just a minute here. Could you people stop what you're doing for a minute and explain something?Such as: What could be more important than etiquette? How can there even be love without etiquette?
Miss Manners is dimly aware that the assumptions underlying her questions are not widely shared. They will no doubt be attributed to her own fixation on that deepest of human urges, the desire to be treated politely. And they will no doubt bring on a case of the snickers.
Whenever anyone wants to satirize the august subject of etiquette, or even, would you believe, Miss Manners herself, the joke is trotted out that anyone who has good manners must be innocent of knowledge or desire for what we shall delicately call mating. Miss Manners tries dutifully to live up to expectations by exhibiting shock at jokes based on the juxtaposition of etiquette and sex, and the presumption that these two aspects of life are mutually exclusive. But she has to say it is getting really tiresome.
However, let us deal with it, she sighs wearily.
All right, children: If the idea of combining romance with good manners is so funny, please explain something to Miss Manners:
Why is it that when love dies of non-violent causes, the cause of death is always cited as some form of inconsiderate behavior?
Why is it that the birth of love is always accompanied by a burst of courteous behavior?
And what happens in between?
The accounts Miss Manners hears of love gone flat rarely mention the word "etiquette." They go something like this:
"When I first knew her, she was always cheerful and made an effort to look great, and seemed interested in everything. I don't know what happened."
Or, "He didn't used to go around looking like a slob and criticizing everything and making fun of my friends. But that was before he started taking me for granted."
Partisans of each of these complainers (and they will both have partisans, in spite of the fact that nobody knows who they are or anything else about them; we live in contentious times) will say that whatever change there was, was provoked by a lack of response. What was the point in going around being nice, when the other person didn't bother?
But Miss Manners is less interested in who started lowering standards than the fact that they did get lowered. At the beginning, both lovers were on their best behavior (or what passes for that in today's no-frills courtships), and each liked the effect enough to want to live with the other on intimate terms.
At that point, the idea kicked in that intimacy is incompatible with etiquette. Such pernicious thoughts appeared as "Now we can relax; we needn't be so self-conscious" and "We should always be totally open and frank with each other" and "I can really be myself with you."
Miss Manners admits that all of these sound like perfectly splendid ideas. Nobody is in favor of self-conscious tension, obfuscation or posing, especially at home.
But surely that really wasn't the way those lovers were behaving toward each other before. Miss Manners knows that people who fall in love are not conspicuous at that time for their amazing critical facilities, but that sort of uneasy posturing sounds truly unattractive.
The tension to which people are referring is that necessarily accompanying the uncertainty of budding love. If things go right, it disappears, and a good thing, too.
But the behavior it inspires is not so much phoniness as politeness. And when that disappears, love goes with it.
Certainly the etiquette of intimacy is different from that of early acquaintance. Otherwise, nobody would ever get to pick up a chicken bone or spend a day in a comfy old bathrobe.
But informal etiquette is still within the realm of manners. That is to say, it still exhibits consideration of others - and even laces that with such charming conventions as pretending to be interested in what the other person has to say, or to consider the other person worth making a fuss about.
Otherwise, people who behave politely during early courtship, and then turn rude with the excuse that they are only being themselves, are committing fraud. That wasn't the self the other person signed on to love.
Dear Miss Manners: After a date, when a man wants to walk me to my door, which door does he walk me to?
The front door of my high-rise building is on a busy street, and the doorman is in the glass front lobby, so there is no privacy for a good-night kiss. Dropping me off at the elevator seems awkward, and again privacy is sacrificed.
If he walks me to my apartment door, other issues arise. What if he doesn't understand good night and waits to be invited in, or worse yet, forces his way in?
Gentle Reader: Did it occur to you that you need not have one policy - whether it is an open-door policy or a closed one - for everyone? That you can offer Most Favored Guest status to some, and not to others?
Only gentlemen, which is to say those whom you know well enough not to suspect of forcing their way into your apartment, should be considered for apartment door status. As you should not be kissing suspected cads anyway, Miss Manners does not understand your unwillingness to part with them at the front door in clear view of the doorman.
However, life has its mysteries. This is why most apartment building lobbies have their huge plants with large leaves.