A rule is a decision you make before you need it. Most of the time, the decisions that matter get made in the moment by whatever happens to be loudest, whether that’s pride, anger, appetite, or convenience. A rule settles the question ahead of time, so that when the moment arrives, there’s less left to decide.

Some of my rules came from the Army, and some came from watching somebody do something and deciding I never wanted to look like that. Others concern dinner parties, money, and manners. I’m 44 now, and the things I used to consider worth fighting over don’t seem worth it anymore, while other things haven’t changed since I was a kid. Some of these rules I follow without thinking, and some require a decision every time. There is at least one I expect from other people that I haven’t always given them myself.

1. Always stand up when you shake a man’s hand.

There was a large family at our church whose children I remember as loud, obnoxious, and badly behaved. One day, one of the nicest men in that church walked over and shook the oldest son’s hand, and the boy stayed seated and looked up at him. I still remember the picture of it, a grown man greeting him and the kid unable to get to his feet, and every time I see somebody do that, I think of him.

The Army reinforced the lesson. You stand at parade rest when speaking to an NCO and at attention when speaking to an officer, and you address people by their rank: yes, Sergeant, no, Sergeant, yes, sir, no, sir. But I don’t need to like a man to stand when I shake his hand. He doesn’t know how I feel about him, and what he sees is whether I get up, so I get up the first time and every time.

2. Always bring an iPhone charger.

You can lose your wallet, your keys, your sunglasses, your shoes, and your watch, but if you still have your phone and a way to charge it, you have options. You can get a ride, get food, call the police, or call girls. Bring the charger.

3. No manicures or pedicures for me.

I’ll do yoga, and I’ll drink a matcha latte every now and then, and I’m aware that a guy who does yoga and drinks matcha drawing the line at a pedicure is not the strongest position a man has ever defended. But it’s my line. To me, the mani and pedi cross too far into the feminine. That doesn’t mean I bite all my nails off. I clip them, like a man.

4. Keep your feet off the coffee table.

This goes double in somebody else’s home, and I don’t put mine up.

5. Don’t be loud.

Being invited into somebody’s home doesn’t mean you get to take over the place.

The loudest one in the room is the weakest one in the room.

6. Never order the most expensive dish when someone else is paying.

If I wouldn’t order it with my own money, I don’t order it with theirs.

7. Never arrive at a dinner party empty-handed.

Bring a bottle of wine, a side dish, something. Somebody is having you over and feeding you, and the least you can do is contribute.

8. Don’t be on time. Be early.

Fifteen minutes early gives me room for something to go wrong. I can miss a subway and still make it to work on time. A woman I’m meeting for a date doesn’t have to sit there waiting for me.

My superiors talked among themselves and noticed that I was always on time. I didn’t have to tell them I cared about the job. They could see it.

Being early is a reflection of how much you care. You’re either there or you aren’t. There’s no lying your way out of it.

9. Don’t speak against another man when he isn’t there to defend himself.

Sadly, this is a rule we have all broken. I have too. It is easy to build a case against a man who isn’t in the room. He can’t correct you, explain himself, or point out what you left out.

If something needs to be said about him, he ought to have a chance to answer it.

10. Don’t sleep with a married man’s wife.

We have all heard the scripture at weddings: “What God has joined together, let no one separate.”

I understand that as applying to me too. If a married woman cheats on her husband with me, I am not standing outside their betrayal. I am choosing to participate in it. I am committing a sin against God and against my fellow man.

I don’t have to know her husband or like him. Whatever is wrong in their marriage is theirs to resolve. I don’t make myself part of it.

That’s a line I don’t cross.

These look like small rules, and most of them are. Nobody’s life is ruined because a guest put his feet on the coffee table. But the small rules and the serious ones train the same thing, which is command over yourself, and if I can’t govern myself at a dinner party, I’m not going to govern myself when something real is at stake.

11. Don’t betray your friends’ trust.

Don’t steal from them, don’t cheat them out of something, and don’t cause problems in their relationships. Don’t say you’ll be there and then disappear when they need you, and if somebody tells you a secret, keep it.

Before I tell anyone something private, I make the request explicit: I’m asking you, please, not to tell anyone this. I say it that way because I trust very few people, and I need them to understand what I’m handing them.

12. Treat me as an equal.

If I’m always coming up with the short end of the stick, eventually I’m out. That applies to a relationship where I’m the one giving the love and making the effort, and it applies to a friendship where I’m always doing things for someone who never does anything back. If I invite you on trips and you never invite me anywhere, I notice.

But I haven’t always met somebody else’s request for my attention. A girlfriend once asked me to put my phone away during our time together, at dinner or at a movie. We spent all day working, working out, and doing everything in between, so there was plenty of time to look at our phones, and she wanted the two hours she got with me to be a no-phone zone.

I’m a news junkie, and I like knowing what’s happening. When I was asked how often I actually followed her rule, my answer was about fifty percent. I demand equal treatment, and half the time, I didn’t give it.

13. Forgive them. Don’t give them the same access.

I’ll forgive someone for what they’ve done to me, but I won’t pretend it didn’t happen. Forgiveness doesn’t restore trust or require the relationship to return to what it was.

Maybe we stay friends and I keep some distance. Maybe the friendship ends completely. I can forgive you without putting you back in a position to do the same thing again.

14. Be careful who you share good news with.

In 2014, I was working at Juice Press in New York and opened a new store. I spent a lot of time getting it ready, staffing it, training the staff, stocking it, and preparing for opening weekend, and the opening went flawlessly. The CEO was there with his wife and her friends, and they kept raving about it. At the managers’ meeting that Monday morning, he praised the opening, and I remember him saying it had my fingerprints all over it.

Another manager sat with her head down. What I read in her expression was rage, bitterness, and jealousy. I can’t know what she was actually feeling, but I know what I saw in her face and what I decided because of it. I couldn’t understand it. Somebody you work with had something good happen, and while you don’t have to jump for joy, you can at least be neutral. That was when I started pulling back, and when people asked how I was doing, I told them I was all right.

I’ve said that hate is nothing but love disguised by jealousy, and that’s how I’ve made sense of some of the reactions I’ve seen to another person’s success. My advice can sound extreme: if someone asks about your finances, tell them you’re broke, and if they ask about your relationship, tell them it’s terrible. It depends on who’s asking, but I worry about giving the wrong person something to resent, something they might decide to interfere with.

15. Always clap when other people win.

Always. That manager’s reaction stayed with me because I couldn’t imagine wanting to make somebody feel bad about something good happening to them, and you can at least be happy for them. I want people to clap for me, and I’ve learned to hide what there is to clap for.

16. When your boss isn’t watching, your boss is watching.

Integrity was one of the Army values I took with me, and the lesson was to do the right thing even when nobody was watching. My rule at work is that somebody is always watching, and I work accordingly.

17. When you know you’re wrong, admit it.

First admit it, then apologize. Don’t blame somebody else for what you did. Take responsibility and commit to doing better.

I come from a military background, and I’m the youngest of four boys, so busting balls and making fun of each other is familiar to me. I’m comfortable taking that kind of humor, and I’ve sometimes treated other people as if they had to be comfortable with it too. I’ve pushed jokes far enough that I legitimately hurt people’s feelings, and I had to recognize that something that wouldn’t bother me could still hurt someone else. I admitted I was wrong, and I apologized.

18. Don’t get even with restaurant workers through a bad tip or a bad review.

I used to be a waiter, and I know how shitty people can be toward someone serving them. I’ve never left a bad tip or a bad Google review because of bad service, bad food, or a bad experience at a restaurant. I’ve spoken to a manager, and I’ve gone back, but I just can’t bring myself to do it. Using a tip or a review to get even feels petty to me, because I remember being the person working.

Most of those rules are about what you owe people and what they owe you. The last few are about what you do with the ability to hurt someone.

19. Protect the people you love.

In 2013, outside Pianos on the Lower East Side, a friend of mine was being jumped by three women. I saw it, ran at them at a dead sprint, and tackled all three to the pavement. They started screaming and crying. Their boyfriends were there, but none of them fought me, and one of them said, “Please just leave.”

It was a Friday night, and there was a crowd, yelling and screaming. I had just tackled three women to the pavement, and I assumed the police would be coming, so my friend, another friend, and I left together. I have no shame about it and no regrets. A friend I cared deeply about was being attacked, and I intervened, and I would do it again.

20. Be capable of force. Know when not to use it.

I believe a man should be capable of protecting somebody, and that he should also have the morals and judgment to control what he’s capable of.

One night, I was locking up at work in Brickell when a younger man walked past, and I thought I heard him call me a slur. I said, “Excuse me, are you talking to me?” and he said, “What’s up?” I told him what I thought I’d heard, and he didn’t confirm it or deny it. Then he asked, “You got a problem with something, man?” I thought I had thirty pounds more muscle on him, and I believed I was stronger and had been in more fights. I said, “You know what, bud? I don’t have a problem at all.”

Afterward, I described it as letting him live. I meant it figuratively. In my head, I could have beaten him up, had everybody recording it on their iPhones, and embarrassed him. The phrase let me tell the story as if I’d won, but what I actually did was walk away.

21. Winning a fight has to be worth what it could cost.

One thing I learned on combat missions in Iraq was to weigh the collateral damage against the military gain. You couldn’t look only at whether you could accomplish the mission. You had to ask what accomplishing it would cost. Was the objective worth the lives it might take?

The stakes in civilian life are different, but the habit of calculation stayed with me. Before I enter an argument or a fight, I try to understand what I stand to gain and what it could cost.

Around forty, I noticed that things I used to go to combat over didn’t seem worth it anymore. Fights stopped seeming fun, people got hurt, and people went to jail. One day I realized I hadn’t been in a fight in about three years, which was strange for someone who used to get into them every weekend. Alcohol, a little cocaine, testosterone, and some shit-talking had started plenty of fights in my life.

Now I can see more of what might happen. Maybe I beat the guy up, or maybe he has a knife. Maybe I get arrested, or maybe the person I think is a grown man is sixteen. An injury, jail, and my reputation can all run through my mind very quickly, and being insulted doesn’t seem worth any of that anymore. The cost was always there. For a long time, I just didn’t count it.

22. Recognize the rule you are trying to unlearn: attack, don’t defend.

This one isn’t advice.

When I was little, I fought with my brother. I remember him starting fights, stealing from me, and lying, and at six, seven, eight years old, I would lose my temper and hit him. He would tell on me, and I would get in trouble. I remember my father slapping me, throwing me to the ground, screaming, and violently shaking me. I came to believe that I was going to be the only one who stood up for me, and that hitting was how I could make things stop. When I described that instinct, I said, “I attack. I don’t defend.”

I still recognize it. I recognized it when I ran toward my friend outside Pianos, in the fights I used to get into every weekend, and outside work in Brickell when I thought about what I could do to the man walking past. The same instinct that sent me sprinting to protect a friend also put me in fights that weren’t about protecting anyone. Outside work, I also saw what could happen after the punch.

I used to think becoming a man meant being ready: ready to fight, ready to protect someone, ready to prove I wasn’t afraid. At 44, I think it asks more than that. A man has to know what deserves his strength and what only wants his pride. He has to know when to stand up, when to step in, when to admit he is wrong, and when to leave an insult unanswered.

These rules are not proof that I have figured it out. They are a record of what I was taught, what experience corrected, and what I am still trying to unlearn. I used to think you became a man by proving what you could do. Now I think you become one by deciding what you will and will not do, and living with the decision. That is what these rules are for.