On the ride home, we got started talking on something that came up during our dinner. It's been a long-running "gag" of sorts between a few friends of ours that new girlfriends/boyfriends that come into the picture needed to be "approved" by everyone else. Elliot dismissed the notion, saying that it wouldn't matter if we had hated his girlfriend Anita when they first started dating, he still would've dated her anyway. I agreed: he could've dated whoever he wanted whether or not anyone liked it.
But...what if we hadn't liked her? For that matter, what if we detested her to the point that her mere presence induced us to projectile vomiting? I have no doubt in my mind that Elliot would've stuck with the relationship anyway.
...it's the other relationships he would've had to slack off on; namely, ours.
What we've jokingly deemed as "approval" isn't so much as a figurative, all-access pass to a super-tight clubhouse akin to the Illuminati, but something much more simple: cohesion.
When you're dating someone, you want them to be able to get along with your friends and vice versa moreso for your own sanity. Fact is, your friends are a part of your life and whoever you date takes up another part of said life and when those sections of your life just.won't.mesh you're the one who gets the shitty end of one hell of a fucked up stick. You want the people in your life to get along because you love them all, if not romantically, and like a kid stuck in the middle of a nasty divorce, you're a little freaked and a little more sad knowing that picking a side means you end up pissing off the other and doing some level of irreparable damage to one relationship for the sake of saving another.
So, lesson of the day: approval isn't just an Asian thing, it's good for everyone; like rice.
