"Okay. I'll do my best not to incur even mild to moderate social consequences," he says. "Which amounts to making sure that the people who know I'm doing that and the people who know I'm the princess's ambiguously close friend aren't the same people. - By 'ambiguously close friend' I mean that it will occur to pretty much anyone who knows how close we are as friends to think that maybe I want to marry you, even if they don't also think we're doing anything socially unapproved in the meantime. And the presence of your father's guards wherever you go is going to make it pretty easy to prove that we aren't."