One night, I headed over to a nondescript frat and began chatting with some friends when this striking, tall drink of water locked eyes with me. He approached me and told me in a really bro-chill voice that he was on his way to becoming the beer-pong champion of the night and that he would definitely find me later. I was about to leave the frat when my guy rushed after me and told me that he was a student at Bucknell and was visiting a friend at Washington University. He explained that he could not find his friend and was in dire need of a place to stay. His story sounded plausible, and so I told him that he could sleep in my common room.

When we got to my romantic old freshman triple on Lee 1, my two roommates were thankfully sleeping. Ben (real names are used because I do not care about protecting the identity of an idiot), smelling deliciously of stale Natural Light and with perfectly unkept hair, suddenly looked at me longingly and went in for the kiss. If I saw fireworks and unicorns, I don’t remember, probably because I can’t seem to shake what happened soon after.

About three hours later, Ben casually woke up and seemed to be studying the contents of my desk. I never took him to be the intellectual type, so I got up to see what Shady Ben was really up to and gasped when I saw that he was taking his morning pee on my desk. I calmly asked him to put his junk away and I began to clean up the awful, warm urine that coated my desk, my computer and my final draft of an essay for a class that I will leave anonymous. I suddenly began to freak out on this bro. He obviously was not used to being reprimanded and excused himself to go to the bathroom.

I never saw Ben again. I took my brand new MacBook to the Apple Store the next day to buy a new hard drive. I was forced to turn in a copy of my essay decorated with a pee stain because all was lost when my computer crashed. Thankfully, I remembered Ben’s full name and found him on Facebook. I sent him a message that I will copy and paste below:

Laura McGinnis: Hey! Sorry I freaked out the other night. Hope you made it back okay to your friend’s place!

Shady Ben: hey ya everythings fine, what happened tho, whyd you freak out

Laura McGinnis: Are you kidding?! you peed on my desk!!!! You pissed on my computer and my essay is covered in your pee!!

Ben never responded. College is college.

I forget when exactly my boyfriend told me that his parents were visiting, but I do remember that we had only been dating for about a month, and although I responded enthusiastically, I was practically lacing up my running shoes (Julia Roberts-style). I prayed that his next sentence would be, “So I’m sorry if I’m not around a lot,” but instead I got what I should have expected: “Want to come out to dinner with us on Friday?” If his arm hadn’t been around my waist, I probably would have been off the couch before he finished the question. But since I was captive, I grinned and said, “Sure!”

When I told my roommate, she was ecstatic. She asked me why I was so nervous, and I exclaimed, “Because they’re his parents!”

We’ve seen it all—there are parents who keep you at arms length (because, after all, you are stealing their child away from them), and others who love you instantly and send you Facebook messages and texts. But no matter what experiences we’ve had or witnessed with our significant others’ parents, we have an inherent fear of meeting the people who raised our boyfriend or girlfriend. Why has everyone decided that “meeting the parents” is such a major event—it’s just being introduced to some new people, right?

Wrong.

Yes, our parents are those obnoxious characters who call us to ask about grades and bug us to book our flights home for Thanksgiving. But odds are that they have spent more time with you than any other person in the world. They know you better, they have dirt on you (including naked baby pictures) and they understand how you work, as much as you may hate to admit it. When a person is that big of a deal in your life, introducing the person whom you are seeing to them is a way of saying, “You are important enough to meet this person who made me who I am. You matter.” And deep down, all parties involved know this.

So maybe the fear isn’t just of meeting the parents. It’s the fear that comes along with realizing how much someone cares about you. Your boyfriend or girlfriend is willing to deal with that weekly phone call that will now incorporate the question, “So how are you and [your name here] doing?” Someone bringing you into their lives in such an intimate way, beyond the realm of dorm rooms and dates, means that they’re in it for the long haul.

As far as my “meeting the parents” episode, it went amazingly well; my boyfriend’s parents were welcoming, kind and tons of fun; we even went out again the next night. And honestly, things have only gotten better since then.

We’ll see how he does next weekend—did I mention my parents are coming in on Friday?