No More Houseguests

When my husband and I moved into our current apartment, it felt like a graduation of sorts. Not because we’d never lived together (we had for six years), or because the place was really ours (we rent, and probably will for the rest of our lives). No, what made this new place seem really groundbreaking was the fact that it had a spare room. For the first time in our lives, we realized, we could have houseguests without anyone having to crash on the couch.

Excited by the prospect of playing hostess, I invited practically everyone we knew—family members, out-of-town friends, long-lost acquaintances—to visit. We started booking weekends months in advance, as though we were running a fancy hotel. I found I enjoyed preparing for new arrivals: putting fresh sheets on the extra bed, buying flowers, stocking gourmet coffee and bakery bread, instead of the usual sludge and Wonderbread I had for breakfast.

Those were the early days. Since then, my enthusiasm for houseguests has taken a nosedive. Now, our spare room is just that: a sort of all-purpose storage unit where we stick out-of-season clothes, yet-to-be-sorted mail, and gifts we don’t want but feel too guilty to return. I can’t remember the last time I changed the bedding—or even if there is bedding under the pile of shirts that I’ve been meaning to iron for a month.

See, my proliferation of guests woke me up to a startling but simple fact: just because you like someone doesn’t mean you want them living with you—even temporarily. In fact, some of my favorite people have turned out to be awful houseguests. I won’t name names, but almost everyone who’s stayed with me seems to fit pretty neatly into one of three categories:

The su-casa-es-mi-casa houseguest. This kind of visitor takes your invitation to make himself at home literally. He wanders around the apartment wearing only pajama bottoms or boxer shorts, rummages through your refrigerator looking for snacks, leaves dirty dishes on the counter and blobs of toothpaste in the bathroom sink. He scratches, burps, puts his feet up, and drinks the last beer. He doesn’t mean to be offensive—in fact, he doesn’t even realize he’s being offensive. He’s just doing exactly what you suggested and behaving as he does at his own place. In my experience, guests with this MO have usually been men; the one notable exception was a female visitor who happily helped herself to the contents of my medicine cabinet (including my mascara and my prescription for Ambien).

The “now-what?” houseguest. Guests of this sort assume that, because you’re giving them a place to stay, you’re also going to entertain them for the duration of their stay.