Help! My man’s a party-pooper: Can your relationship survive the party season?

By Hazel Davis

You love a good knees-up – but HE hates socializing and just wants to stay in and read a book. Can your relationship survive the party season?

‘We’re having a Christmas bash at our house,’ says a new friend. ‘Lovely,’ I say, ‘I’ll be there.’ ‘It will be great to finally meet your other half,’ she says, and my heart sinks. Oh dear, it’s one of Those Parties. Parties where you have to take your partner. My brain works fast to engineer an excuse. ‘Well we couldn’t really stay long as there are no trains that late and one of us has to be there for the dogs,’ I say.

It’s a familiar pattern. I make a new pal, we get on like a house on fire, they ask us round to dinner and I start rolling out the pathetic excuses. And during party season it’s even worse.

Anti social partner: Does the idea of going to a party or out for dinner fill your other half with dread?

It’s not that I’m ashamed of my partner, far from it. He is kind, generous, funny and thoughtful. He makes lovely food, walks the dogs and cleans up after himself. To all intents and purposes he’s the ideal man. But when it comes to socializing, we couldn’t be more unsuitably matched.

The idea of going to a party or out to dinner in a group for him is about as enjoyable as eating a pair of shoes. In fact he’d probably agree to the latter so long as it was in his own house and he’d cooked them himself.

It’s the same even on special occasions. Earlier this year, a couple of days before my birthday, I had a dinner, just a small celebration in a Leeds restaurant with some friends and their other halves.

It was such a lovely evening, with presents, cards, cake and a rousing chorus of Happy Birthday. My partner? He was at home, reading a book. ‘Where’s Bob?’ my friends enquired. ‘Oh he was working too late to get the train in,’ I said, one of my usual standard lines. ‘Could he not meet us later for a drink?’ came the usual helpful response. Gulp.

Bob, meanwhile, is bewildered by everyone’s need to include him in such parties. ‘Just tell people I don’t like socializing,’ he says. It’s always been like this. When we met at university 13 years ago, I knew my guy was a loner. He was smiley and pleasant but he wasn’t what anyone would describe as a ‘people person’. If you saw him around campus he’d be the one in a hat, sitting under a tree reading a book.

Work parties are a no-no: ‘Every year he is invited, every year he declines. I have never met his colleagues’

During our courtship he told me about the best day of his life, when he was 17 years old, working in a hotel in Derbyshire and he woke up at 7am started reading a book and finished at 7pm without speaking to a soul all day.

Meanwhile, I adore meeting new people. I thrive on it. The prospect of a room full of new folk, all of them potential new friends, is positively thrilling. The idea of going out in a large group, sharing an activity with them or even going on holiday – I can think of nothing better. I make friends easily and I go to the opening of an envelope.

And so it continued into our relationship. When we graduated (he very nearly didn’t go to his own graduation and had to be persuaded) and he found his dream job working with a wholefoods co-operative, I moved 250 miles to the county he grew up in, expecting that I would make new friends. But he hadn’t kept in touch with anyone from school (’why would I do that?’) and he sure as hell didn’t want to socialize with anyone from his new workplace (’they’re my colleagues, not my friends’).

So I made my own entertainment. I joined a local choir and started a masters degree, gathering friends along the way. My new friends would occasionally pop over for coffee and then they’d drop the bombshell that perhaps we’d like to go to a party they were having that weekend.

And then the excuses would start. Bob and I would argue initially and I would stay home or we’d ‘compromise’. Which usually meant us not going at all. Eventually, at the end of my tether, I began going on my own, hooking up with single friends or taking along a platonic ‘date’ instead.

I developed a whole other sociable life away from him. So now, together we go to the cinema and to concerts and out for dinner and we have a lovely time at home. We play Scrabble and we read together. Essentially anything that doesn’t involve Other People. And without him, I go to parties, for meals, to festivals and weddings.

Socially mismatched: ‘The idea of going to a party or out to dinner in a group for him is about as enjoyable as eating a pair of shoes’

Ah, weddings. When we hit our late 20s, old friends inevitably started to get married. Cue an excruciating few years of awkwardness, leaving early and – on occasion – downright lies to avoid going. ‘I just don’t understand why they need me there,’ he’d say, ‘you go on your own if you care that much.’

On the few occasions I have managed to drag him along to a wedding (usually by use of emotional blackmail or the promise of not staying too long), the whole experience has been so traumatic that I return determined not to bother next time.

As a naturally sociable animal my instinct is to flit around talking to new people, but every time I look over he’s sitting looking dumbstruck or bored and I feel obliged to rescue him.

Or, worse, his awkwardness renders me unable to speak to people because I fear introducing him and him having nothing to say, so we stand in the corner talking to each other.

I recently came under some criticism from my family for not staying long enough at a large family party started at midday and continued into the small hours. We arrived late afternoon and left around 7pm. When we left the party I had nearly cried with pride that we’d made it at all.

When my relatives later complained we hadn’t stayed so long I wanted to jump up and down and scream about how they were blooming lucky we came at all, so much effort had I put into getting us there in the first place.

Bob’s defense is clear and logical and makes complete sense as he explains himself. ‘I don’t like talking in groups,’ he says. ‘You either end up listening to a loudmouth or it becomes a butting-in game and not a conversation.’

Weddings are objectionable because, ‘they are forced jollity and an ostentatious display of money’. They are, he says, ‘a complete waste of a day and you’re usually there to make up the numbers and make people feel popular.’

He doesn’t like restaurants because ‘If you go out to a restaurant you’re bombarded with canned music and blather and noise and you can’t hear people properly,’ and, he adds, ‘I don’t like drunks and I don’t like shouting at people in loud bars.’

He was apparently like this as a child, always preferring books to people. What’s surprising is that most people think he’s shy but he’s actually very self-assured. As he says, he just doesn’t enjoy socializing and he prefers the thoughts in his head to those of other people, and always has.

When I complain that sometimes you just have to put up with things for the sake of friendship he counters with, ‘OK, then, well make them all come out on a 20-mile walk.’ How can I argue?

Work parties are a no-no, of course. Every year he is invited, every year he declines. I have never met his colleagues, apart from in town by accident or when I have collected him from work.

Last year his work had their annual Christmas lunch and he waited until it was over until going down to eat because ‘the crackers and extra plates got in the way of my newspaper.’

His argument against going to the work Christmas party is that it would spoil his working relationships. While most of us gladly grab the opportunity to get sozzled and make inappropriate suggestions to our colleagues, my partner finds the whole idea tiresome.

‘What I really value is a decent professional relationship with people,’ he explains. ‘In order to preserve a good professional relationship, I want to keep the personal relationship on the lowest possible burner.’

Compromise? ‘I began going on my own, hooking up with single friends or taking along a platonic ‘date’ instead’

He gets on well with his colleagues and he is well liked but to explain his unwillingness to socialize with them outside of work he produces the following laborious explanation.

‘I see them for 40 hours a week. I have around 80 hours a week when I am not sleeping. Forty hours of that are spent at work, ten hours are spent traveling to work. With the remaining hours, why on earth would I want to extend my working week?’

What do his friends think of this? Well, I think you can guess what I’ll say to that. While I make friends left, right and center, my partner’s unsociability does make the idea of having friends difficult.

There are a chosen few (mainly my friends and their partners) who have doggedly hung on and who are now tolerated at the homestead dinner table without struggle but they know better than to issue an invitation to a party or expect us to attend a dinner party together.

We met up for a rare coffee with a good male friend of mine some months ago and while there Bob passed on some books that he thought my friend would like. A week or so later my friend broke the cardinal rule and texted him to say how much he was enjoying one of them.

You’d have thought he’d asked to borrow £1,000. ‘Why did he need to text me?’ came the response, ‘why can’t he just read the books?’ adding, ‘I just don’t understand why he would want to waste his and my time sending me a text saying something we both already know.’

But- you know – I have spent 12 years trying to change him, trying to make him into a party animal (or at the very least a party-goer) and finally I think I might have given up.

When I rock in at 2am, party-hat on sideways, the worse for wear on pink fizz and he’s there, book in hand, with a cup of milky coffee and a kind word, I know things could be worse, far worse.

Source: dailymail.co.uk