Please Don't Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes

by Phoebe Robinson

  As I’m sure you’ve picked up on, when people from different cultures and countries date, there is a learning curve for each person in everything from traditions to pop culture references. Not only that, but people outside the relationship are curious about how the learning is going. (DISCLAIMER: THE START OF THE NEXT SENTENCE IS FULLY ANNOYING, BUT ALSO, IT’S WHAT HAPPENED, SO LET’S GET IT OVER WITH.) The last time my boyfriend and I hung out with Bono (SEE, I TOLD YOU, BUT THE WORST IS OVER), he asked Baekoff and me what it’s like dating each other, since it was the first time Baekoff had dated an American and I a Brit. We get this question a lot because when BB and I are together, we, without fail, turn into a comedy duo, playfully ribbing each other and telling ridic stories to the delight of those around us. Also, the question comes up because movies like Notting Hill, Like Crazy, and The Holiday tend to reduce each culture to cutesy quirks and clichés: Brash American doesn’t know the proper fork to use at dinner! Sheepish Brit stutters charmingly because he can’t express himself! And I’m not saying that’s not sometimes true, but that’s not the whole truth.

  Alright. Real talk: I always secretly hoped that I’d date a Brit because I was pretty into British culture growing up. Like the Hugh Grants. The Colin Firths. Knockoff Burberry trench coats that I buy at H&M. The Idris Elbas. Okay . . . when I write “British culture,” I just mean “handsome and charismatic men who appear in some of my fav movies and TV shows like Bridget Jones’s Diary and Luther. So I was a part of the problem. However, at the time of this book’s publication, Baekoff and I will have been together about four years, so now seems as good a time as any to break down our observations about each other and our respective cultures since we began dating:

  What better place to start than with the title of this essay: “Bish, What? That’s English?!” Even though we both allegedly “speak English,” we had trouble communicating with each other during the early stages of our relationship. He’d constantly say, “Stop yelling at me.” I’d be confused and reply, “I’m not yelling. This is my normal voice. Besides, none of my friends think I’m loud.” To which he responded, “All your friends are loud. Your entire family is loud. Everyone you know is loud. Every person I’ve ever met in America is loud.” Damn. Well, that settles that then. And what about on my end? When I first heard him speak, I thought to myself, Oh, you just out here doing Kama Sootch aka Kama Sutra to the English lang? I mean . . . is this what English is supposed to sound like?!?! And when I wasn’t all hot and bothered over or envious of his accent, I wished I could rock one of those earpieces that former secretary general of the United Nations and Ghanaian diplomat Kofi Annan wore at UN meetings for language translations so I could understand what Bae was saying to me.

  Remember the birthday trip with Bae to London I mentioned earlier? It was fantastic, magical, romantic. Blah, blah, blah. It was also eye-opening because I saw grown-ass adults wearing barrister wigs. I had no idea they’re still doing that goofy shit! And when I asked him what the deal was with the wigs, he merely shrugged, as he had become so accustomed to seeing them that they didn’t register to him as anything noteworthy. Before I go any further, if you’re reading this and you don’t know what a barrister wig is, lemme learn ya something. They look like shag carpets with a bunch of Little Debbie brand Swiss Rolls spray-painted white and hot-glued down the sides and back. Simply put, they ain’t cute or chic, but that’s not what we were taught in school, right? Like, we read about eighteenth-century aristocrats who were supposed to be of a “superior class,” and we’d look at drawings and paintings showing them wearing powdered wigs and they were considered the height of fashion. LIES! Those mofos were a bunch of Gigi and Bella Hadon’ts because they were filthy and funky. That’s right, back in the day, folks were riddled with syphilis (dry heave) and lice (dry heave). So to cover up their hair loss, unsightly scabs, and rashes, their short- and long-term soloosh aka solution was to make wigs out of horse, goat, or human hair. And this tradition carried over to the judicial system because lawyers be fuckin’!

  Kidding aside, wearing the wigs quickly became a sign of professionalism, and this tradition still hangs around hundreds of years later despite the fact that people’s natural hair is highly visible underneath the wigs. Yikes. If you did that on RuPaul’s Drag Race, you’d automatically have to lip-sync for your life; meanwhile, lawyers are out here lawyering to save lives while looking like a sad-ass Halloween costume and smelling like Seabiscuit’s haystack. And to make matters worse, barrister wigs can cost up to $1,350, while some judges’ wigs top out at $3,800. Come again? Actually, don’t because that’s how we got in this mess in the first place. Hey-o! But for real, those prices are ridiculous. Very smart people are spending a month’s rent or a mortgage payment to look a fool! UK, get with the times. Do like 75 percent of Black romantic comedies where, halfway through the movie, the lead cuts her weave out of her hair and decides to wear her hair naturally as an India.Arie song plays in the background. Ditch the wigs and show off your real hair, barristers!

  Unlike many a Brit, Black women do not put their purses on the floor. Black women do not hang them from a door. Black women do not leave purses in the company of strangers. Black women probably wouldn’t even feel comfy leaving them in baby Jesus’s manger. In all seriousness, it is true the whole “no purse on the floor” thing is superstitious, as is the belief that the two shall never meet or else you will have money troubles. But that’s not what it’s about for me. Simply put, most places are trifling and most people are shady. Leaving my bag unattended is a surefire way for it to get dirty and/or stolen, as I learned the hard way when, years ago, I was dating my ex and we went to a party. “Hide your purse under that pile of coats,” he said. “No one will find it,” he said. “Everyone is chill,” he said. Fast-forward a few hours to when I was ready to take me and my raggedy Forever 21 dress home, only to discover that my wallet with all my cards, ID, cash, and checkbook* were taken from my purse. I had to cancel all my cards, get a new checking account, a new ID sent to me, and borrow money from a couple of friends to tide me over. It was a disaster, but a lesson that has stayed with me to this day. In fact, on several occasions when I’ve done a stand-up show at a sketchy place, I’ve brought my purse onstage with me and opened my set with, “I don’t trust none of you heauxes,” and everyone, especially the Black women, laughed and nodded.

  You know in Ozark when Ruth, the plucky criminal who often finds herself backed into sticky situations and one time, due to being overwhelmed by all the criminal activity going on, she said, “I don’t know shit about fuck”? That’s how I feel about the metric and Celsius system. If, as a kid, I knew I was going to end up with a Brit, I would have demanded that my teachers educate me on this. In middle school, we spent maybe one or two weeks on these measuring systems before our brains started hurting and we went back to U.S. units of measurement, which, if I’m being honest, I barely have a handle on. Horsepower? All I know is I’ve seen a GMC commercial or two where a pickup truck proves how much horsepower it has by racing against a herd of black stallions in an open field, which is exactly like zero point none of our lives. Anyway, the point is I’m now in my thirties, struggling to do Fahrenheit to Celsius conversions in my head so I can participate in small talk about the weather with my boyfriend’s relatives during the winter holidays.

  Speaking of small talk . . . y’all. I assumed that because I’m from the Midwest, I knew small talk: “How are your kids?” “Have you been to Sam’s Club lately?” “Can you believe the traffic on I-271 today?” “I love that dress. Where did you get it from? No way! And it was 40 percent off?!” That’s some quality, foolproof stuff. Well, turns out (say it with me!): I don’t know shit about fuck! Because Brits can easily spend a half hour in SmallTalkVille just yammering on about the weather, football aka what we call soccer, and what’s on telly so as to avoid awkward silence in social situations; meanwhile, the average American is ready to wrap it up after five to se
ven minutes, and if there’s some silence, oh well. Baekoff realized this the hard way. You ever ask the question “How are you doing?” and then the heaux had the nerve to tell you how they were actually doing? Well, until recently, my boyfriend was that heaux. He’d get excited at this query and chat away; meanwhile, the innocent person listening to him probably thought, I know that if I could go back in time and not ask this man how he was doing, I’d risk bringing about catastrophic consequences as a result of this butterfly effect, but flap dem wings, boo, and get me out this conversation! Anyway, the person and Bae would finish talking, and he would be slightly confused. I’d go, “Hun, just say you’re good and keep it moving. No one has time for your pip-pip, tallyho cheeriness.” But let’s be real. Most people don’t actually really care how you’re doing, especially in New York. It’s just a thing to say when you’re greeting someone / walking to and fro / getting waited on at a restaurant / participating in the social contract of “Doing the Least to Prove That I’m Not a Serial Killer,” etc. I know that sounds harsh and unfeeling, but I argue that it’s more of a matter of time and place. Us Americans can certainly pass the time with surface-level chitchat. We just don’t want to do that all the time. And, more often than not, if we truly want to know how you’re doing, we ask in a different way: “You good?” “You eat?” “You taking care of yourself?”

  Formula 1 racing. The first time Baekoff turned it on, I was like, “Isn’t this just NASCAR, but for people with investment portfolios?” Apparently, F1 is a huge deal: 1.9 BILLION people watched it on television in 2019, the official F1 podcast, Beyond the Grid, reached fifteen million downloads over forty-three episodes in the same year, and Netflix’s docuseries Drive to Survive, which allows viewers to see what goes on behind the scenes (read: lots of petty drama) is an international hit. Clearly, plenty of people love the sport, and after watching Survive with Bae, I know how difficult it is to be a race car driver, and yet . . . the sport is boring as fuck! They drive around in circles wearing jumpsuits emblazoned with the names of cars I can’t afford—Ferrari, McLaren—and everyone takes themselves so seriously. Between you and me, the only reason I watch it at all (besides spending time with my boyfriend) is that Lewis Hamilton is hot, routinely beats his competitors, and is Black. Like Issa Rae said, “I’m rooting for everybody Black.”

  You know how when someone will want to drink and be like “Well, it’s five o’clock somewhere” to excuse why they are drinking so early in the day? Well, that’s how Brits are about sweaters. Excuse me . . . jumpers. Jumpers are all the rage for Brits and they will find any excuse to wear one. “Well, surely a leaf fell in Chechnya, so I best put on this here jumper in case it gets cold.” My boyfriend is also like this. He’s always dressed like the leader of a poetry group at the University of Manchester.

  I’m down with a lot of British cultch—the sarcastic sense of humor is right up my alley, eggcups are adorable, and unnecessarily adding the letter “u” in words such as “colour,” “honoured,” and “humour” is a bit twee, but I’ll allow it—however, British people and the whole “washing machines in the kitchen” thing is absolute nonsense. Part of me doesn’t even want to bring this up, because sometimes Brits can be a tad touchy about the whole thing, like when UK TV presenter of home design and property shows Kirstie Mary Allsopp tweeted a few years ago that having washing machines in kitchens is disgusting, so she’s dedicating part of her life’s work to eradicating this tradition, which resulted in an outcry on Twitter. Lol. Usually, a “life’s work” is curing a disease, ending hunger, raising kids, mastering Busta Rhymes’s verse in “Look at Me Now,” but also, I get it, Kirstie! Doing laundry in the kitchen is low-key nasty. The kitchen now smells like a week’s worth of funky drawers, sorting your clothes into color-coordinated piles means you have dirty clothes all over the kitchen floor, you’re spilling Tide detergent granules everywhere, etc. This, to me, is an un-fresh hell. And this opinion, I am told by social media, is a classist point of view as plenty of people in the UK don’t have a utility room to put a washing machine in, and placing it in a bathroom is usually a no-go due to many UK building regulations for wiring in a bathroom. Okay . . . and? Do what we do here in America: Put your laundry in cumbersome drawstring sacks, pack some Luna bars and trail mix, and take your ass on a harrowing journey to the laundromat and wash your clothes there. Is it annoying? Yes. Is it time-consuming? Obvs. Isn’t it also much more sanitary and up to code to not wash my Thinx period panties next to an open bottle of balsamic glaze in my kitchen? Fucking duh.

  Just think about it this way. If you went to Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant and caught a glimpse of him shoving a pile of dirty gardening pants in the wash while he was dressing your beet and goat cheese salad, you’d be like, “No, non, nein” and leave. Yes, none of us are running restaurants, but we have people over! We’re feeding friends, family, and children food that was prepared mere inches from unclean clothes, which, according to my research, is something Brits have been doing since the invention of washing machines, without question or serious pushback. Maybe I’m overthinking it, but that’s highly unsanitary, especially when the prevailing thought is that Brits are overflowing with class and Americans are gauche as fuck. I don’t think so. If I were Anne Hathaway’s character in The Princess Diaries when Julie Andrews was gently reading her to filth for her lack of etiquette, I would’ve been like, “Bitch, please. I may be an ignorant American, but you probably have loose, dirty ankle socks lost underneath your refrigerator that smell like the women’s locker room at Wimbledon. You truly cannot tell me shit.”

  The other day, Bae and I were enjoying a silent moment that couples share when they’ve been dating long enough to know that not talking all the time doesn’t mean they’re not compatible, they’re just comfortable being in the presence of the other person. So there we were chilling in a very pregnant pause, when apropos of nothing, he lifted his head from scrolling on Instagram on his phone and said, “Walmart—I will never understand why anyone would want to buy clothes, a gardening shed, and guns all in the same place.” Same, babe. Same.

  You’ve seen it in movies, read it in books, or perhaps have been warned by a friend: Brits are stiff, dour, and unfeeling people. But as the legend aka Hollywood reminds us, it doesn’t have to be that way. All it takes is for a plucky and loud American to show the sad, uptight Brit there’s more to life than uttering “How dreadful” at things that are barely faux pas, that getting ketchup all over your face at dinner means you’re carefree, and that rolling up your chinos, sitting down in a park, and reading to your partner is a sign you’re not only opening up your heart and falling in love, but that you have transformed as a person! If the love Baekoff has for me ever inspires him to take me to the park and lie me down on the grass so he can read to me while ants use my scalp as the hosting site for their family reunion barbecue that’s soundtracked by Kool & the Gang’s “Get Down on It,” I’d consider that a hate crime against the faux locks I had freshly installed in my head and yet another assault on womanhood that’s masqueraded as romance. Call me cynical, but this sort of gesture reeks of pretension and feels distinctly like something men do at women, because way back when, men got together and decided these masturbatory and empty exercises are what women wanted instead of, I don’t know, asking us?

  Seriously, I imagine that back in the day, women were like, “What we really want are our rights. Can we look into getting us some?” And men just said, “Nah, you know what you need? To spend even more of your time having a basic-ass white dude talk at you. Lemme read you some Lord Byron. He had bars. Check out this sonnet.” Aaaaaaaaaand that’s how we ended up with this tomfoolery. I must say that after dating a Brit for the past four years, I don’t necessarily disagree with the stereotype that they’re a reserved people; however, I’ve personally observed that Brits generally choose to stick with either the safety and comfort of small talk (I’ve literally felt one of my eggs die inside me after a tw
enty-minute convo about Wallace & Gromit) OR at the first sign of a personal, substantive discussion, they shut down. And it seems the realer a situation and/or a topic of discussion gets, the more inclined Brits are to go with the latter option of closing themselves off.

  Why? Maybe it’s because the weather in the UK is cold and dreary, thus making folks more pensive and reticent to open up. But the weather in Seattle is depressing—it rains there on average 152 days a year—yet Eddie Vedder managed to make a whole damn career out of expressing all of his feels while sounding like a flooded carburetor. So what’s up, UK? Why do y’all tend to hold back on revealing yourselves? There’s probably a multitude of reasons, but I’ve learned that with Baekoff’s family, they’ve never been a particularly verbose bunch. Emotions are just on a need-to-know basis and, apparently, how one feels about anything that’s going on personally or professionally is not anything loved ones need to know? So when I started dating Baekoff, I must’ve seemed like I was a walking emotional open flesh wound with a fresh application of Neosporin as I kept him up to speed on every single thing I was feeling. Meanwhile, for me, he’d often come off like a tight-lipped Downton Abbey downstairs servant too scared to tell me that he accidentally sneezed on the tray of Yorkshire puddings for the Christmas party I’m hosting. Obviously, for things to work between Bae and me, we had to find some common ground. I’ve learned that I don’t need to express all of my emotions and opinions all of the time; meanwhile, he has realized that behaving like an at-risk youth who needs me to get my Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds on so he can open up to me for five minutes has made a bitch tired.