My dad once told me the only way to be happy is to either be a great person or a bad person.
If you are a great person, he says, when someone asks you for a favor, you do it gladly. Of course I’ll pick you up from the airport! I’d be happy to water your plants! It makes them happy to make you happy! If you are a bad person and someone asks you for a favor, you decline and never have another thought about it again because you’re a bad person.
But if you are neither a great person nor a bad person—if you’re a good person—you say yes to favors. You say yes, even though you deeply don’t want to, leaving you feeling resentful, anxious, annoyed, and ashamed. I am a good person. A fundamentally selfish person, but nonetheless a good person.
I was tested by this dilemma recently, at a dinner I was hosting. It was the first dinner party I’d thrown since I moved into my house.
How to throw a good dinner party is something I learned from my mother, who always curated them immaculately. Every guest was thoughtfully selected to create the perfect dynamic, to complement the group’s overall chemistry, and to foster the best conversation. Good conversation, she always said, is the most important thing.
Creating the guest list for my first dinner party, I followed her example. It felt like doing a personality puzzle. Given that my own personality completely changes depending on who I’m around, I understood the importance of this puzzle viscerally. If I’m with someone too lively and energetic, my personality drops dead. If I’m around someone too dull, I morph into a clown and expend all my energy performing for the rest of the evening. Hitting that middle ground was therefore key. After a few hard-earned drafts, I was convinced I had nailed it.
On the day of the dinner party, as I was scrambling in that pre-hostess mania to get everything I needed before sundown (currently 4:52 P.M.?!), I received a text from one of my guests asking if she could bring her friend.
Thus began the good person’s dilemma.
If you are neither a great person nor a bad person—if you’re a good person—you say yes to favors. You say yes, even though you deeply don’t want to, leaving you feeling resentful, anxious, annoyed, and ashamed.
What’s the big deal? You might be thinking. It’s just one person! One person can’t possibly bring about an energy that inexplicably puts everyone on edge …
To that I say, if one person can change the world, one person can surely change the vibe at a small get-together. In fact, the world seems to be made up of people who understand this and people who don’t. For those who don’t, allow me to add my two cents in these trying times (the holidays).
The most understandable reason to ask to bring a non-invited guest to a party is obviously social anxiety. Given that this could not have been the case with my guest, who already knew and was comfortable around several other people attending, we can assume instead that she received a text from a friend asking to hang out on the night of my dinner party.
Now put yourself in the invited guest’s shoes. The first thing to do when confronted with such a text would be to tell your friend—let’s call her Cynthia—that you’re busy that evening. Unfortunately, though, we live in a world densely populated by the insane and mannerless, so there is always a chance that Cynthia doesn’t take the hint and asks to tag along. In which case, you, the invited guest, should ask yourself, What kind of a person is my host? If they are a great person, go ahead and ask to bring Cynthia. If they are a bad person, likewise, ask away. But if there is even a chance they might be a good person, PAUSE HERE.
If one person can change the world, one person can surely change the vibe at a small get-together.
As established, the good-person host will be physically incapable of saying no to this request. The good person has no boundaries and is incapable of building them. Even if they do manage, against all odds, to put a boundary up, everyone knows that the good person’s boundaries are flimsy and fake, and so they will immediately come for the boundary. They’ll poke at it and prod it, and it will fall apart, like a piece of paper in a rainstorm.
If the host is a good person, just say no without ever bringing the matter to your host’s attention. Feel free to throw the host under the bus if need be. Call them a weird, anti-social misanthrope. Say they’re a snob, a weirdo, a freak. Say you’re only going because they threatened to kill themselves last week. Say it’s more of an intervention than a party. Say whatever you need to say to prevent doing what we all know you are about to do—text the host asking to bring a plus-one, precisely because you, the invited guest, are also a good person, and as such are physically incapable of saying no as well. For good people, life is a long game of shifting the burden of responsibility onto others.
The host might take a while to respond, because they are thinking about how their personality puzzle has just been thrown all over the floor as if by a toddler mid-tantrum, and they are busy consulting the other dinner-party guests, desperately seeking permission to say no.
“You have to say yes. You have no choice,” most of the invited guests will say (good people). One will say, “Of course! The more the merrier!” (great person). Another will say, “I don’t get it. If you don’t want them to come, just say no?” (bad person).
In the end, none of these opinions will matter. Deep down, you, the host, already know that if you were to say no, you would spend the rest of the day hating yourself, to the point that by the time the party began, you wouldn’t even be able to look at the invited guest without thinking about the fact that you said no. About how it would have been completely fine if they’d brought their friend, and how weird and antisocial and maybe even mentally ill you are for having said no.
So here we are. Cynthia is coming. The equilibrium you worked so hard to achieve is almost sure to be destroyed.
But not all hope is lost. There are some things you, the invited guest and your friend that you are bringing, can still do to alleviate the dismal situation, things which I used to naïvely believe were instinctual but apparently are not.
If the host is a good person, just say no. Say you’re only going because they threatened to kill themselves last week. Say it’s more of an intervention than a party.
As soon as the dinner party has begun, the burden of making the evening go well spreads between the invited guest, the guest’s friend, and the host. We’ve all heard the saying “A guest should never show up empty-handed,” a nice gesture but, in my opinion, not even close to the most necessary thing. Just because you decide to have people over doesn’t mean that everyone should suddenly have to buy you a gift, as if you’re doing them a favor when they’re the ones who had to leave the house. You might as well just Venmo-request people in exchange for being their friend.
The saying should really be “An uninvited guest should never show up empty-handed.” Don’t even think of it as a gift so much as a consolation prize: Sorry I’m here and maybe going to ruin the vibe, but at least you now have these candlesticks! Or this bottle of wine!
Your next job as the uninvited guest, empty-handed or not (hopefully not), is to say something nice and gracious immediately upon stepping through the door. “You have such a lovely home” or “Thank you so much for including me” will suffice. If no version of this is said, I’m afraid redemption will be near impossible … Cynthia. Are you paying attention?
It is the invited guest’s job to mediate the delicate social interactions that take place thereafter, remaining an active participant in the group dynamic, while also acting as, essentially, a social babysitter to the uninvited guest, constantly making sure they feel comfortable and included so the host doesn’t have to worry about it.
It’s the host’s burden to be welcoming and friendly, as well as to convincingly conceal their disappointment at the intruder. For example, when the guest’s friend first walks in and ideally says, “Thank you so much for including me,” while handing over a pair of candlesticks, the host must say something along the lines of “Oh, my God, it’s no problem at all. So happy to have you! You shouldn’t have!”
It is the uninvited guest’s job, and this is very important, to walk on eggshells. You must enter the room believing, even if it’s not true, that no one wants you there. I understand that that sounds bad, but to believe anything else is to risk walking into a delusion with disastrous consequences (social awkwardness). Therefore, the only way to win over the host and her invited guests as a non-invited guest is to come in with your head hung low. Not too low, so as to attract even more attention to yourself, but just low enough so that everyone knows that you know that you have potentially thrown off the vibe of the night and intend to do your best to preserve what that vibe could have been.
So here we are. Cynthia is coming. The equilibrium you worked so hard to achieve is almost sure to be destroyed.
Until dinner, you should continue to exist with reservation. On metaphorical tiptoes. Friendly and present, but not domineering, not champing at the bit to perform a Kristin Wiig–style comedy sketch.
If and only if you start to get the sense that the host and her invited guests appreciate you, your stories, your input, or your gossip, then can you start to be yourself. And even if this seems to be the case, you should let your true self out slowly, gradually. Not like a bat out of hell.
When sitting down for dinner, you will notice there is one seat that is clearly worse than the others. It’s been dragged from another room and placed on the corner of the table. Take that one. That one is for you. Once the food is served, do not take too much food. If you have a scarcity mindset due to some kind of transgenerational trauma, stifle it.
If things go well, the guest and her friend will leave first. If things go badly, you will notice the host’s friends leaving one by one an hour earlier than they normally would while Cynthia is still acting like she is onstage at U.C.B.
If you truly know your friend, and you truly know your host, and you still believe it’s worth it, and that all of these social dynamics can be adhered to, feel free to reach out and ask if you can bring a friend along to a dinner party. If there’s even a small chance things might go off the rails, in that weak moment where you think maybe it’d be nice to say yes to your friend who just hit you up, the best gift you can give all good people on God’s earth this holiday season is the gift of being a bad person.
Cazzie David is a Columnist at AIR MAIL and the author of No One Asked for This, a collection of essays about social media and millennials
