The other day my mind was wandering from topic to topic as minds do, and somehow ended up back in summer of 2000 when I decided I was destined to become a lawyer and my mother (a lawyer) decided that I needed some intervention more data points. So she sent me to California to spend some time with my aunt and uncle (both lawyers) to get a sense of whether or not it was the right field for me.
While I was there – touring their offices and going to court with my aunt’s brother (uncle in-law?) – I stayed at my aunt and uncle’s beautiful house in Beverly Hills. The guest room turned out to serve double duty as a TV-watching room for my three cousins. I have no idea how old they were at the time; whatever ages are known for Peak Rambunctiousness. But I remember very clearly that it caused me a great deal of angst to have them eating snacks and jumping around on my bed.
I am a very private person with a strong sense of personal boundaries, not to mention an introvert who needs – NEEDS – time alone to recover and recharge. And being around virtual strangers all day, learning about The Law in It’s Various Forms (my aunt did some sort of real estate law, my uncle did tax law, my uncle-in-law did litigation – I think; it didn’t really stick; clearly The Law was not my jam), away from home/college/familiar territory and routines meant that I was in severe need of my own space. So trying to grab a few minutes alone in my room, only to be bombarded by three noisy humans clambering all over one another was not especially fun. Not to mention feeling like my sheets would be full of goldfish crumbs or whatever they were snacking on/throwing at each other. Blech.
That experience really defined for me one of my personal Key Principles of Hosting: that your guest should have his/her own space. If I have a guest over, I will not for any reason go into the guest room. This is simple, because our guest room really has no purpose outside of baby clothing repository clean laundry dumping ground Guest Room. On the rare occasions during which we have guests, I want them to feel like they truly have a place to call their own.
(Sidebar: Other people don’t feel this way, I acknowledge. I have been a guest in a home where the guest room has a Working Closet, and the hostess feels comfortable coming in to retrieve clothing from that closet whenever she needs to. Which I get! It is her house! But it still makes me uncomfortable. [However, I also come from a place of not wanting people to be in my bedroom EVER, and this woman is comfortable popping into my bedroom to look in the full-length mirror or to borrow my hairdryer from my personal bathroom without asking.] [There is a hairdryer IN THE GUEST BATHROOM!] [Also, many people BRING THEIR OWN HAIRDRYERS when they travel!!!] [People have different comfort levels and different boundaries and different expectations.] [My blood pressure is rising. Kittens. Birds bathing in puddles. Gentle rain. Babies sleeping with their rears in the air.])
The problem is that we have two bathrooms. I mean, this is great, right? One bathroom for me and my husband, one for our guest. But… the non-master bathroom is Carla’s bathroom.
When we have guests, I have tried to be conscious of the Shared Bathroom issue. Instead of leaving Carla’s foam letters and numbers all over the tub as we do on a normal night, I would put them away in the closet. But our guests were still sharing a bathroom with her.
And maybe that’s… not in line with my Hosting Philosophy? Maybe we should have Carla share OUR bathroom the next time guests stay here (which, at the rate we host people, could be in five years)?
I guess this question just popped out at me when I was thinking back with such displeasure at having to share my bedroom with my cousins. Have I been making guests feel uncomfortable by having them share a bathroom with Carla?
Of course, it probably depends a great deal on the guest. But I think if it were ME, staying at someone else’s house, I would want my own space.
This is why I plan to mainly stay at hotels. But the topic of hotels is a whole different post. (Sometimes it is not practical. At my parents’ house, for instance, where the nearest hotel is many miles away. Or at my in-laws’ house, where they have an entire separate WING for guests and the nearest hotel costs $500 a night.)
I would be very interested in how other people approach hosting and guesting. Where do you stow guests at your house? What’s the bathroom situation like? What kind of expectations do YOU have for your situation when you stay with someone else?
And I have Strong Feelings about other aspects of hosting/guesting, but for now I am trying to stick very closely to Issues of Personal Space.
Sigh. I feel like I should qualify things – like I need to say, “Of course, I know this all sounds spoiled and picky! And if someone is kind enough to open her home to me, I should be gracious and grateful for whatever the accommodations are!” And YES. Of COURSE. My dear friend Ilse has invited me and Carla and my husband to her house this summer, and we are going. But Ilse has no guest room, so we’d end up either displacing one of her daughters or on the floor of the living room, and there’s only one bathroom. That situation would make me so uncomfortable, it wouldn’t be worthwhile. So we already have our hotel BOOKED.
Anyway, what I am trying to say is that MY hosting/guesting philosophies are purely a result of MY personality. And I am DEEPLY INTERESTED in how other types of people see and handle the same kinds of situations.
When I had the big house, we had a guest room and a bathroom that they could use. Now I am alone in a smaller place. I have a bedroom in the basement with a half bath. I have told some guests if they don’t want to sleep in the basement, they can sleep on a couch in the family room or a couch in the small living room. I feel just like you, I don’t like people in my bedroom.
I think bathrooms are different than bedrooms—mostly because there are usually far fewer bathrooms than bedrooms, and because they’re generally considered to be shared private (i.e., one person at a time, but many people) spaces. I think you COULD have Carla share your bathroom when you have guests, but I don’t think it’s at all necessary. In a normal-sized family home, I love to have my own guest bedroom (and really would feel less comfortable if people were coming in and out of it), but wouldn’t expect my own bathroom.
(I didn’t mention our hosting philosophy, because literally no one visits a family with five children.) (Okay, probably some people do. But no one visits us. We’d have to put them on the living room floor if they did.)
I also feel VERY strongly about having personal space and needing time alone. I even hate that when we visit people whatever “my space” I have is shared with my husband!
In college, I lived with my aunt and uncle for a summer and it was kind of a hybrid of the situations you described. My room was definitely My Room and they were very respectful of that. They also had some things in the closet – not every day things, but every couple weeks things, and my aunt always asked if it was OK if she went in and got something. I, of course, always said yes and was grateful she was kind enough to ask.
I did not have a My Bathroom. There was a bathroom across the hall that was my cousin’s bathroom, mine, and also any guests who were at the house for any reason (like just stopping by or there for the afternoon). I didn’t mind at all! I don’t expect to have my own bathroom when visiting people. (Or even living there for three months!)
I do slightly mind the bathroom situation at my in-laws, which is that the guest room is in the basement and there is no bathroom down there. You have to go upstairs. It’s quite annoying if you have to go in the middle of the night and even showers are not super convenient. There’s nothing they can do about it, though. That’s where the bathrooms and bedrooms are situated.
Yes to all of The Uncomfortable Feelings generated when either hosting or visiting – it all makes me a big believer in the hotel option (we all know the old saying about houseguests and fish – they both stink after two days…).
Having said that, on the infrequent occasions when we do have people staying at our house I do try really hard to pre-empt as many eventualities as possible and do all of the ‘tips to make your guests comfortable’ things as I can think of (flowers, biscuits, tissues, magazines, slippers, water carafe etc, etc) so that they shouldn’t have to ask for too many things and be made to feel awkward. It’s basically exhausting! I also feel that our guest room is ‘theirs’ alone whilst they are here and would only go in to have a very quick check for stray glasses or mugs for example if they had gone out.
I love discussions like this. People are so fascinatingly different, especially with respect to the introvert/extrovert divide.
Like you, I am a strong introvert and I almost never stay with other people when I travel because it makes me Very Uncomfortable. I prefer hotels. Like the above commenter, we have five children, and so yeah, almost no one visits a family with five children. Usually only my father stays with us, but we have had the odd other person, and for the bathroom situation (we have 3 baths, master, “little kid” and “teenage girl” bathrooms) the general rule is this, and it works quite well: “common” bathrooms (ie. not the master, which you’d have to go through our bedroom to get to) can be shared by anyone for toilet-using purposes, but the small children use our bathroom for bathing/showers while there is a guest and the guest gets exclusive use of theirs for bathing/shower purposes while they are here. This might not work with older kids/fewer bathrooms, but it seems like it might work for your situation.
I literally had never thought about separating out the uses of the bathroom that way. But it makes total sense. AND has the added benefit of being very practical!
Our current home has a separate guest apartment. We live abroad right now and when we have guests (grandparents) they tend to stay for awhile. The separate apartment makes ALL the difference. I love my family, but I’m an introvert who gets very antsy with no alone time. It is so nice for everyone to have a nice dinner, say goodnight, and then disappear until the following morning after they’ve enjoyed a leisurely breakfast in their own space. This is especially true because we live in the literal middle of nowhere and there is not much getting away from each other otherwise.
I realize I’m very fortunate, and again, this is only possible because we’re in the middle of nowhere. When we move back to civilization it is unlikely we will even have a guest room because there is a limit to the number of bedrooms we can afford in the city.
A separate guest apartment sounds like a dream. Putting it on the Wish List If I Hit It Big.
We have neither a guest room nor a second bathroom, so visitors get an air mattress in our office and everyone shares a bathroom. This is made very clear to anyone who visits. If they don’t like it, they can get a hotel room. I think the thing is that you have to have clear communication with your visitors before they arrive. I think that if this conversation is uncomfortable, then the visitors are probably people I don’t want visiting my house.
I, for my part, would not care about sharing a bathroom with a toddler, but I would not share a bedroom.
YES. Clear communication is definitely the key. Very good point.