Is she really going out with him?

Phillip concurs. "I was friends with somebody for a long time and didn't know how he dealt with women because he wasn't dating. Then he got into a relationship, and people's relationship personalities are often different than their normal social personalities. With his friends, with work, he was a pretty mellow guy. In a relationship, he was a control freak." Phillip decided to express his concern that the woman his friend was dating seemed "like a dangerous person to mess with because she had already demonstrated herself to be a manipulator of men and a habitual liar." The conversation didn't go well. "He felt like I wasn't giving him credit for managing his own life, and I think he's right," Phillip says. "After he schooled me, I apologized and pulled back on making those kinds of comments. He got into another relationship recently, and now I only give advice when it's been solicited."

Most people don't weigh in on their friends' partners not only because they don't want to seem intrusive but also because they don't think it will do any good anyway. Angela's roommate Sharon was dating a woman named Lisa who was, Angela says, "insane." But Angela, 28, a program manager at a Washington nonprofit, said nothing because, she explains, "the fact that she was dating Lisa in the first place was a level I couldn't relate to Sharon on. The first thing that would have come out of my mouth would have been, 'How could you even think of dating her? She's crazy from the get-go!'"

Angela refers to Sharon and Lisa as "the gruesome twosome"; she refers to just Lisa as "the imp." "She was mischievous and short, she wore short pants, and she kind of hopped around," Angela says. "She would put her hands on Sharon's waist and follow her around like a little impish child. She had this really annoying way of using Sharon's name at the beginning and end of all sentences, like, 'Sharon, what do you want for dinner, Sharon? Sharon, are you hungry, Sharon?'"

Among Lisa's worst transgressions? On a night when Angela, Sharon and their other roommates had all made plans to go to a bar together, she kept the group waiting in the car for 45 minutes while she "had issues" with her clothing, and then, upon arrival at the bar, she refused to come inside and made Sharon drive her home. "She would totally play with Sharon's mind," Angela remembers. "She would tell her, 'You don't love me. Do you love me, Sharon? I think you hate me, Sharon!'"

A UCC is bad enough; the only thing worse is when you're the one who got them together in the first place. "I don't want them to break up because I know he loves her," Charlotte says of her friends Scott and Rebecca, whom Charlotte and her husband set up. "I'm not that selfish. [But] the last time we hung out, she was so fucking annoying I wanted to strangle her."

Rebecca's crimes include, Charlotte says, extreme nosiness. "She's always probing for the negative. Even if you say something like, 'I'm so exhausted,' she'll be like, 'Really? Why? What's going on?' Or she'll corner you at a party and say, 'So I heard your grandmother died.' And you're standing at the keg!" Rebecca's nosiness manifests itself in other ways as well. "She just gets her little paws on everything," Charlotte says. "If you're cooking them dinner and you go to the bathroom, when you come back she has the oven open and she's testing to see if the food's done." Charlotte is surprised, she says, that actually, Rebecca has a lot of friends. "Some people really like her," Charlotte says. "But cool people don't."

Talking about UCCs always, of course, carries with it the stench of judgment -- a fact about which Charlotte makes no apologies. "Are you kidding?" Charlotte says of herself and her husband. "We make a sport out of judging." But underneath the more unattractive reasons people criticize friends' partners, there lies a reason it's hard not to find endearing: namely, that you think your friend can do better because you see your friend as so great in the first place.

"If you want to be with this person I adore, I want you to be able to step up and match her," says Hillary, the business school graduate. "And if you're not able to be like her, then you should be reverent. You should make it very clear to me as the friend and self-appointed gatekeeper that you love her for the reasons I love her."

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