The Rules Nobody Wrote Down.

From family dinners that never end to cheese, closed shops, German breakfasts and the question of when to speak up, Geneviève explores the quiet rules that govern ordinary life.

By Geneviève, France

There are family dinners where everybody is having a wonderful time. The food is good, people are talking and nobody seems to be in a hurry.

Except perhaps me.

Eventually, I begin to get tired. Somebody is still talking, somebody else is almost falling asleep, and I am yawning while wondering when we are finally going to leave.

But I cannot be the first.

Nobody has announced this rule. Nobody has written it down. Yet somehow there seems to be a moment when leaving is acceptable and another moment when it is not.

Sometimes I would simply like to make my own decision and go home. It does not mean I have not enjoyed the evening. Quite the opposite. We may have had a lovely time together. But surely, at some point, being tired is a perfectly good reason to leave?

Or is that impolite?

That was where our conversation began, with a question that sounded almost too simple to be interesting.

Who goes first?

As it turned out, it was not a simple question at all.

A house full of people.

I enjoy having people at home, but I also want to enjoy the people I have invited. That is why I try to prepare as much as possible the day before. There is little pleasure in organising a gathering if you then spend the whole thing in the kitchen while everybody else is having a good time.

A barbecue can work well for exactly that reason. The person cooking is still part of what is happening. People move between the table and the barbecue, conversations continue, and somebody hopefully remembers that the cook needs something to drink.

The cook, meanwhile, needs to remember the meat.

These small details matter. Hospitality is not only about putting food on the table. It is about creating a situation in which people feel comfortable — including the person who invited them.

But there is another side to hospitality. When does a guest become too comfortable? And when does a host have the right to decide that the day is over?

We talked about lunches that begin around midday and continue into the early evening: another course, then cheese, perhaps dessert, coffee and still more conversation. One gathering lasted from late morning until the final guest left at seven.

For the guests, it may have been a wonderful day. For the host, it was also a great deal of work.

The difficulty is that you cannot always tell your guests you are tired, and the guests do not always realise that perhaps it is time to leave. Nobody wants to spoil a happy occasion.

So everybody continues sitting.

The serious business of cheese.

Then we came to cheese.

If you want to discover how seriously people take unwritten rules, cheese is an excellent place to begin.

There is already the question of when to serve it. In France, the usual order is cheese before dessert. Elsewhere, people may be accustomed to something different. You can explain that, of course, but explanation does not necessarily produce agreement.

People become surprisingly firm about these things.

Then there is the question of how to cut the cheese. When I was young, there were already certain habits at home. A round cheese was cut in a particular way. The first person took a piece, and the next person continued accordingly.

I cannot remember anybody formally teaching me this. I simply watched what the adults did and eventually did the same.

That is how many of these rules enter our lives. Nobody sits a child down and says, “Here are the rules of cheese.” You observe, copy and learn.

The difficulty begins when you enter somebody else’s home and discover that their rules are not yours. You take the knife, cut yourself a piece and suddenly find that you have committed a small cultural offence.

Should somebody correct you?

Perhaps. But it depends very much on how they do it.

There is a difference between explaining a custom and making somebody feel foolish for not knowing it.

During our conversation, the Mayor remembered being corrected by a guest for the way he was cutting cheese in his own home. The correction was quite firm, which produced another question: if you are a guest in somebody else’s house, who actually decides what is correct?

The person who knows the traditional way of cutting the cheese?

Or the person who owns the cheese?

I think a little diplomacy is useful here. You can know a rule without insisting that everybody else follows it exactly. Sometimes it is better to say nothing, or perhaps explain something gently later.

After all, the purpose of having people around a table is not to prove that you know more about cheese than they do.

It is to enjoy their company.

Doors, breakfasts and coffee.

A doorway seems easier.

If people are getting off a train or bus, you let them out before you try to get in. That is practical. They need space to leave before you can enter.

But put two people in front of an ordinary door and even this becomes less certain. Does the older person go first? Should a man hold the door for a woman? What if one person is entering and the other is leaving? Does it matter whether you are at home, in a shop or somewhere public?

We learn many of these habits so early that we stop noticing them.

I remember school, where the teacher was the person who opened the door and allowed us to leave. You did not simply stand up because you had decided the lesson was over.

You waited.

Years later, the teacher has disappeared, but some of the habit remains. The Mayor noticed that I waited for him to open the door before leaving. To him it was an interesting little detail. To me it hardly seemed worth noticing.

Perhaps that is one way of recognising an unwritten rule: somebody else notices something that you no longer notice about yourself.

Working in Germany gave me plenty of these moments. One thing I found strange was seeing colleagues arrive at work carrying their breakfast. They might bring bread or a croissant and eat after reaching the company.

For me, breakfast belonged at home.

Sometimes I began work at five or six in the morning. If I had to start very early, I got up at around three, dressed, had my coffee and bread, and then drove the forty minutes to work.

That was simply my routine.

So when colleagues arrived and began preparing breakfast, I wondered why they had not eaten before leaving home.

Of course, they could have asked exactly the opposite question.

Why get up even earlier when you can eat at work?

Neither system is necessarily better. Once we have organised our life in one particular way for long enough, however, it starts to feel like the natural one.

I am rather definite about coffee too. If I want a coffee, I would like to sit down and drink it.

I do not really understand the growing habit of carrying coffee everywhere, walking along the street with a cup while heading towards the next appointment. Perhaps it is practical. Perhaps everybody is so busy that there is no longer time to sit down.

But coffee, for me, is a pause. You sit, you drink, you have a moment.

Why must everything be done while moving?

The French Sunday.

Shop opening hours brought us to another set of expectations.

In some countries, shops are open on Sunday and sometimes for very long hours. There is certainly a convenience in knowing that you can buy almost anything whenever you want it.

But I do not particularly need shops to be open every Sunday.

If you live somewhere where they close for one day, you organise yourself. You learn when you can buy things and when you cannot. Eventually that becomes normal too.

Of course, I have also stood in front of a closed shop wishing it were open. We all forget things. Sometimes you suddenly discover that you need something.

But there is another person in this arrangement: the person who has to work in the shop.

When we talk about convenience, we usually talk from the customer’s side. We do not always think about the person who has to provide that convenience.

Perhaps some of the new machines selling food outside normal opening hours offer a compromise. We talked about machines selling pizza, eggs and other products. You can still buy something if you need it, while another person can enjoy their Sunday.

There may even be something useful in accepting that not everything has to be available whenever we want it.

Sometimes we can simply organise ourselves.

When something doesn’t look right.

Not all unwritten rules are about cheese, coffee or holding doors.

There is a more difficult question: what should you do when you see something that seems wrong?

During the summer, I noticed a vehicle in our street that made me suspicious. It appeared to be a taxi, but it remained there for a long time and I could not understand why. It was very hot and there were hardly any people outside.

I watched for a while. Certain details about the vehicle seemed unusual, and eventually I became concerned enough to telephone the gendarmerie. I explained what I had seen and why it had made me suspicious.

They listened and thanked me for calling.

I never found out whether anything was actually wrong. Perhaps there was a completely innocent explanation. I simply do not know.

But that uncertainty is part of the problem. When should we pay attention to something unusual? When should we speak up? And when should we mind our own business?

The Mayor described a difficult encounter involving his mother and a driver on a narrow street. What began as a small disagreement about somebody’s behaviour became unpleasant very quickly, and that led us to another problem.

What happens when you challenge somebody?

There may have been a time when correcting bad behaviour in public felt relatively straightforward. Today there can be a worry that even a reasonable comment will provoke an aggressive reaction.

You may be absolutely certain that somebody is behaving badly.

But is it wise to tell them?

Being right and knowing what to do are not always the same thing.

This is where politeness becomes rather more complicated than holding a door open. Sometimes speaking up is the responsible thing to do. Sometimes saying nothing is the sensible choice.

The difficulty is knowing which is which.

Rules we hardly notice.

Towards the end of our conversation, we began talking more broadly about how life has changed.

I sometimes notice houses where a wall or fence needs attention, while the owners seem to spend money on other things. From my point of view, maintaining the house would come first.

Another family may see things completely differently.

We also talked about the old idea of working hard to obtain the house, the good car and everything else that was supposed to represent a successful life. People could spend years working to pay for these things and, sometimes, become so busy acquiring them that they forgot to enjoy living.

That too can be an unwritten rule.

Nobody necessarily tells you that you must own a certain house, drive a certain car or live in a particular way. You simply see what everybody else appears to be doing and begin to assume that you should be doing it too.

Perhaps younger generations are making different choices. Perhaps priorities are changing. But that does not necessarily mean one generation has understood life better than another.

We began with a family dinner and the question of whether I was allowed to be the first person to leave. Somehow we travelled from there through cheese, doors, German breakfasts, takeaway coffee, Sunday shopping and whether you should telephone the gendarmerie when something in your street does not look right.

They seem like very different things.

Yet the same question runs quietly through all of them.

We grow up watching how other people behave. We copy them, repeat what we have seen and eventually stop remembering that we learned it at all.

Then somebody does something differently.

They eat breakfast at work. They carry coffee through the street. They cut the cheese the wrong way. They want to shop on Sunday.

Or they stand up after dinner and announce that they are going home.

That is often the moment when we discover that what felt completely natural to us was actually just one way of doing things.

I do not think every old habit needs to disappear. There are traditions worth keeping and small courtesies that make life together more pleasant.

But knowing the rule is not the same as knowing when to insist upon it.

Sometimes flexibility helps. Sometimes diplomacy is better than correction.

And sometimes, after a very enjoyable family dinner, you should simply be allowed to go home and get some sleep.