I once lived in a very small house with some roommates. One of my roommates (L) was a delightful young woman who had just moved to the city, she had a few friends in the area and we decided to have a party.
Problem was, our house was tiny. Five people, max, could sit comfortably in the living room, and ten people uncomfortably. Most of my friends were of the clique-type, ie if you invite one you had to invite them all (not because of their clique-ness but more to avoid the social awkwardness of “hey, why did cowgirl have a party and invite our mutual friend but not me?”). We had to think hard about who to invite to ensure our small party remained small.
So we carefully thought through a guest list, including some of the people she knew and some of the people I knew, people who we figured would get along well with others and so on.
As it turned out, we didn’t think it through as carefully as we should have. For one thing it was mostly guys who turned up, so it was a bit of a sausage-fest from the start.
Now, you know that guy who fancies himself the most interesting fellow in the room, and indeed in the world? The guy who knows so much about everything that he never needs to stop and listen to others? The guy for whom the volume and quantity of words is far more important than content, interest value, and validity? You know that guy? Everyone knows that guy. And in fact, what we didn’t realize when planning the guest list, was that most of the guys who turned up were, in fact, THAT guy.* The few who were NOT that guy were quickly freaked out by those who were, and made themselves scarce. I can’t blame them, hell, the only reason I didn’t run for the hills is because I lived there and wanted to make sure nobody stole my stuff.
So there was our tiny living room (and front hall and stairwell), filled to the brim with crashing bores. My roommate and I could do nothing but drink and hide in the kitchen.
Until, late in the evening, we each started to be pursued by one of the crashing bores. We were both thoroughly drunk by that point, making the evening even more surreal and hard to take.
My suitor was a fellow whose friendship I had always enjoyed, but with whom I had made the mistake of sleeping when he was on a “break” with his girlfriend. From what I had heard he was back with her and I think they were even engaged by that point, but this did not seem to dampen his enthusiasm for me at all. I spent the evening trying to enjoy his company (because, although still crashing, he was less of a bore than most of the other people there) while persuading him that “we” were not to be. Eventually I sent him home in the dead of night and went to bed alone.
L was much worse off. See, her boyfriend lived in another city, and her boyfriend’s best friend from childhood (let’s call him K) lived in the city. The boyfriend had always been encouraging them to hang out because she really didn’t know anyone else, so he was one of the chosen few invited to the party.
The drama that I missed, while enveloped in my own drama, was that K started pursuing L quite seriously around the party. This cumulated in him proposing marriage to her. (I’m not kidding.) Her response: “Are you on drugs?” His response: no, he was deadly serious. he had been thinking about it for a long time and he figured that he was much better for her than her existing boyfriend (his own best friend) was. He had just bought a farm and (in her estimation) wanted to waste no time in finding a nice wife and starting a family.
Thankfully I have learned from this. Now I either invite everyone I know, or nobody at all, and I have a few friends who can serve as all-purpose party accessories and create fun wherever they go. If I had known them when I had this party things would have ended very differently.
*Upon reflection, this does speak poorly of my choice of friendships at that time. But in my defense, I did have cool and interesting friends but none of them would have come without their posse of cool and interesting people, so I couldn’t fit them all into my house at once. Also, crashing bores have the effect of bringing out that tendency in others (particularly when the proportion of females is low), so there was this multiplicative effect as well.
