Instead of talking at each other about the non-business-related contact, talk to each other about your concerns about marriage. Listen a lot, too.

Unfortunately, I think the expectation is that birthday girls don't pay.

You can't make people like you under the best of circumstances, and you certainly can't make them like you while you're actively badgering them on what you perceive to be their failures of conscience.

Your parents' views are, by current standards, out there. Getting in their faces about it would be needlessly disrespectful, but there's no reason for you to tiptoe through their delusional little terrarium as if you can't bend even one blade of grass.

You can't make someone agree with you, not even when you're 100 percent sure you're right.

I think we'd all hate to be the one who gets declared undateable by one's entire grad-school population based on a couple of told and retold stories.

Of course the thoughts and awareness are there, but it's all incomplete and often fanciful - kids know there's something to know, and they fill in a bunch of the blanks with their imaginations if their parents haven't had the conversations and/or established themselves as sources of information. It's rare that the kids know nothing at all, and the somethings they do know are often only partially right or flat-out wrong.