Meet the parents

Meeting your partner’s family is a biggie. And trying too hard to make a semi-decent impression is a surefire bet that something dodgy will go down. I’m about to meet my boyfriend’s family for the first time and while I’m hoping I won’t accidentally set fire to the house or give one of his siblings a black eye (a la Ben Stiller in Meet the Parents) there’s a good chance I’ll spill food on my clothes and not notice, or worse, get drunk and start a table-slapping discussion about something taboo.
It’s just as bad for blokes, says Timmy, 40. “It's always at least slightly nerve-wracking because of the tangible sense of "Is this bloke good enough for our daughter?" that you get,” he says.
That pressure led to Jason, 27, royally cocking up the first meet’n’greet with his then-girlfriend’s folks. “I tried to score brownie points by offering to clean the goldfish pond, but when I killed all the goldfish they’d had for years after not using fish-friendly cleaning agents, I was pretty much history,” he remembers ruefully.
Language barriers don’t help, warns 35-year-old Alana, who wishes she could forget the first time she met her then Spanish boyfriend’s father, Antonio. “We were talking about Australia’s rabbit problem and the Spanish word for rabbit is conejo. I thought that ‘cono’ was the shortened, familiar form, but unfortunately it means ‘pussy’. So I say, ‘Hay mucho concos en Australia’ meaning there were a lot of rabbits in Australia but I’d actually said there was a lot of pussy in Australia! You can imagine how that went down...’
Overly-friendly parents still give Kath, 36, the willies. “My boyfriend’s dad was good-looking but a total letch and kept ‘accidentally’ feeling me up as he brushed by. Yucko!’
But Tash, 37, has a sweeter story to tell of the day her parents met her partner Paul. “They’d had some wine and were all jovial; Paul was nervous as hell,” Tash remembers. “And his really long curly hair didn’t help... mum kept coming up and playing with it; she is pretty tactile at the best of times but ridiculously so when drunk, and poor Paulie just kind of grinned and bore it. But you know what? They fell in love with him and 8 years down the track are still madly in love with him.”
Awww. Maybe there’s hope for me yet!

*** Your turn, kids. Any scary meet’n’greet stories - or, for that matter, tips on making a good first impression? I’m all ears...