The Rules of Engagement

The Rules of Engagement are the five boundaries Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew establish before travelling together through the Dodecanese Islands. Framed as a way to keep their holiday from becoming complicated, the rules turn unspoken questions about intimacy into explicit terms of companionship. Their particular force lies in the gap between the friends’ insistence that they are safely platonic and the teasing, breaches, and repeated negotiations that make the rules necessary.

Purpose and Circumstances

On the second day of a ten-day island-hopping holiday, Emma and Dexter are sharing the sunny deck of a ferry crossing the Aegean Sea. They have slept off a taverna hangover and, for the moment, feel entirely at ease together. The narrator presents this as a rare, perfect day: the holiday is new, their friendship is familiar, and the rules are still holding. The calm matters because the prohibitions were drawn up in anticipation of complications, not in response to an already declared romance.

The plan had taken shape on a Friday night in June, when Emma and Dexter sat outside a pub on Hampstead Heath and worked out the terms before their departure. They describe the rules as a kind of platonic Geneva Convention: a deliberately formal agreement for a relationship they consider secure, but whose closeness might be tested by shared travel, drinking, and the prospect of seeing one another in swimwear. They tell themselves that an earlier window for romance has closed and that they are now immune to one another. The act of writing rules, however, gives that claim a playful qualification: a boundary needs stating precisely because the situation could put it under pressure.

Their recent romantic histories help explain the arrangement without making either friend’s past the rules’ main subject. Emma is single again after a brief relationship with Spike, a bicycle repairman; the relationship ends without much fuss but has helped restore her confidence. Dexter has stopped seeing Naomi, saying that the relationship was getting too intense, and has since moved through several brief relationships before settling on Ingrid. The friends’ agreement is therefore made against a present-tense backdrop of new partners and changing romantic circumstances, rather than as a promise to become a couple.

The Five Provisions

The first rule requires separate bedrooms. It excludes sharing either a double or a single bed, as well as drunken cuddles and hugs. Dexter dismisses cuddling as uncomfortable, while Emma agrees; their joking exchange makes the prohibition sound both practical and defensive. The phrase that they are no longer students supplies its rationale: they want to avoid the casual physical intimacy they associate with an earlier stage of life.

The second rule bans flirting. Dexter claims that he does not flirt, even as he rubs his foot against the inside of Emma’s shin. That small, physical contradiction gives the rule its comic edge: the claim of innocence arrives alongside a gesture that can be read as flirtatious. Emma then clarifies the broader terms with a third rule: no funny business with her or anyone else. She does not want to be left watching Dexter rub oil into another woman, and he assures her that this will not happen. The restriction is not solely about protecting Emma from a possible romance between the two of them; it also addresses the prospect of being made an uncomfortable observer of Dexter’s holiday flirtations.

Emma’s fourth rule requires nudity to be avoided. There is to be no skinny-dipping and no casual exposure in bedrooms or bathrooms: she does not want to see Dexter in his underpants, in the shower, or using the toilet. Its insistence on modesty extends the agreement beyond sexual contact to the ordinary privacy of shared travel. Dexter answers this personal rule with one of his own. His fifth provision forbids Scrabble and Boggle, games he regards as tedious and feels make him look stupid, especially as more of his friends have taken up playing Scrabble ironically. The arrangement is thus reciprocal but not uniform: Emma’s rules regulate physical intimacy and social awkwardness, while Dexter’s protects him from games he dislikes.

Enactment and Breaches

The rules are put to work in a holiday made up of both intimacy and separation. On the first night, Emma and Dexter stay in Rhodes’s Old Town and drink sugary cocktails served in hollowed-out pineapples, grinning at the novelty of travelling together. The ferry leaves before dawn; by nine in the morning they are reading, eating oranges, nursing their hangovers, and quietly sharing the sun. Emma has chosen the holiday reading, including a copy of Nabokov’s Lolita that she gave Dexter, and has packed enough books to fill much of her suitcase. These details show how readily they share time, conversation, and small acts of care while the written rules try to define what they will not share.

The rules do not remain an abstract joke. On another night, after Dexter recounts kissing a man at a gay club while intoxicated, Emma responds by asking what happened rather than treating the disclosure as a rupture in their friendship. Later, when they review their conduct, she concludes that they have broken Rules One, Two, and Four. The account identifies the breached provisions but does not specify the acts behind each number, so the rules’ recall is more revealing than any reconstructed explanation would be. Their numbering turns the episode into a shared ledger: both friends can acknowledge transgression, and Dexter can answer by observing that at least they did not play Scrabble.

That exchange preserves the agreement’s characteristic mix of seriousness and levity. The rules are not enforced as a formal code with stated penalties. Instead, Emma and Dexter can count breaches together, joke about what remains intact, and carry the same terms into the next day. The very act of keeping score suggests that their boundaries are porous, but it also shows their continuing willingness to discuss them rather than pretend the question of closeness has disappeared.

Reaffirmation and Significance

At the harbour, Emma calls after Dexter to remember the rules. When he asks what she means, she specifies the need for two rooms, and he agrees. The exchange gives the first provision a renewed practical form: after a holiday day together, they still intend to sleep separately. Emma then drags both backpacks to a small café, takes out a pen and her cloth-bound journal, and struggles to write anything beyond the fact that everything is fine. She feels, unusually, that she is exactly where she wants to be. The scene holds her contentment beside the need to restate a boundary; happiness in Dexter’s company does not erase the agreement that structures it.

The Rules of Engagement consequently serve both as comic housekeeping and as a measure of the friendship’s unsettled closeness. Separate rooms, limits on flirting and nudity, and a ban on particular games give the holiday a vocabulary for negotiation. Their breaches complicate the claim that Emma and Dexter are immune to each other, while their repeated reminders show that neither treats the terms as irrelevant. The rules do not settle what the friends are to one another. They let them continue travelling together while naming, testing, and renewing the distance they have chosen to keep.