The Unspoken Rules

Nobody sat you down and taught you these. There was no orientation, no pamphlet, no substitute teacher rolling in a TV cart to show you a grainy video about it. And yet every single person in the room knows them, follows them, and will judge you into dust the moment you break one.

These are the unspoken rules. The invisible constitution of being a person around other people. You can't cite them. You can't look them up. But the second somebody violates one, the whole room feels it in their spine.

Let's start with the big one, the granddaddy, the rule that has ended friendships and possibly a marriage or two: don't double dip.

You get one trip. One.

You take your chip, you load it up with whatever the host put in that bowl, you eat it, and then you get a new chip like a civilized adult. What you do not do is take a bite, look thoughtfully into the middle distance, and then send that same chip back down into the community trough.

That's not a snack anymore. That's a saliva delivery system.

And here's the thing. Nobody says anything. Nobody ever says anything. They just quietly stop eating the dip, and you spend the rest of the party wondering why you're the only one enjoying the queso.

You're not the only one who wanted it. You're the reason nobody else can have it.

Next: never, under any circumstances, get involved in an argument between a husband and wife.

You will think you're helping. You are not helping.

You are a man walking into a hurricane holding an umbrella, saying, "Well, actually, I think you both have good points."

Here is what happens next. They stop arguing with each other. They turn, in perfect synchronized horror-movie unison, and they argue with you.

Because the one thing a married couple can always agree on is that whoever just butted in is the actual problem.

That fight was going to last eleven minutes and end with a shared dessert. You just made it a three-day silent treatment with your name in it.

Sit down. Look at your phone. Become furniture. That is your role.

And then there's the holiest one of them all: if a no-hitter is going on, you do not speak of the no-hitter.

It doesn't matter that everyone in the ballpark can see the zeroes on the scoreboard. It doesn't matter that the broadcast is putting a giant graphic on the screen every half inning like it's no big deal. You don't say the words. You don't even say the shape of the words.

You don't lean over to the guy next to you in the seventh and go, "Hey, do you realize..."

No. Shut up.

Somebody's uncle has been sitting in the same position with the same beer for two hours and he will not move, because he knows he was sitting like this when the fifth inning ended and he is not going to be the guy who jinxed it.

That's not superstition. That's service.

That's a man taking on a burden so that a stranger on a mound in Chicago can have the night of his life.

What's beautiful about all of these, if you sit with it for a second, is that they're all the same rule wearing different outfits.

Every one of them is basically this: the thing you want to do right now would be worse for everybody than simply staying still.

You want the dip. You want to be the peacemaker. You want to say the exciting thing out loud. And the unspoken rule says, cool, want it quietly.

The whole social contract is basically a bunch of people agreeing not to do the slightly selfish thing at the exact moment it would be easiest to do it.

There are a hundred more of these, and you know every one.

You don't take the last slice without offering it first.

You don't sit directly next to someone in an empty theater.

You don't hold the elevator door and then make eye contact for eleven floors.

You don't reply all.

You don't tell somebody how the movie ends, even if they're being annoying about not having seen it.

You don't start getting your things together to leave someone's house and then somehow stay another hour and a half. Once the goodbye has started, we're all committed.

Nobody wrote these rules down, and I don't think anybody should.

Because the second you make it official, somebody's going to start arguing about the exceptions.

And I promise you, that guy is double dipping.