Swat the barfly: an ode to marriage

As a happily-married suburban guy who doesn't drink much and is several steps down the road to boring adulthood, it's been a while since I've hit the big-city downtown bar circuit. Throw in the fact that most of my friends are now married too, and it's also been ages since I've attended a "get a bunch of single people together" house party. But this weekend with the wife out of town and boredom setting in, I managed to do both. I also managed to realize (again) how great it is to be married so that I don't have to spend time looking for a potential girlfriend in either of those settings.

The evening started with the house party, a birthday celebration for a friend of a friend of a friend. In other words, the only person I knew at the party was the guy I came with, and he only knew one other person. Quick fashion aside -- I wore my standard uniform: reasonably nice black t-shirt and rapper jeans. My buddy wore a pink button-down shirt, sweater vest, and linen pants. Since nobody knew us, we weren't surprised to find out later that a rumor had started that we were a gay couple. Anyway.

In my single days, I was really bad in these kinds of social settings. I'd end up clinging to the one person I knew, or hanging out silently in the corner, watching people and making everyone nervous. It's been my experience that if I talk to girls at parties, they assume I'm hitting on them, and guys don't want to spend time talking to me when there are girls around that they could hit on. Being married changes things; guys still don't want anything to do with me, but I drop the phrase "my wife" into conversations with females as fast as possible, implicitly stating, "I'm married and not trying to flirt you. Now we can have a conversation like reasonable adults, and you can take a break from having the other guys here hitting on you if you want." It makes life fantastically easier.

After a few hours of socializing and drinking, the whole party headed downtown to one of those trendy bars where they replace a random vowel in the name with a "Y" to add an air of sophistication and justify serving stupidly overpriced alcohol. Happily, the typical third element of that equation, the impossibly stuck-up staff, seemed to be missing. We got there ahead of the crowds, so I took out a quick home equity loan, bought a round of drinks, and sat back to watch the mayhem.

Mayhem definitely ensued. Roving bands of gym-toned boys with artistically-mussed hair, girls in too-tight black pants showing huge swathes of cleavage, etc. I'm not going into further detail, because it's not like I'm describing an unfamiliar scene; you can find the same thing at any downtown bar where the doormen wear suits. All I can say is that I've reached a point of my life where I don't want to do that more than once every three or four months, when the entertainment value of watching the attack/defend manuevering of the singles scene outweighs the annoyance of being in close proximity to so many males wearing hair gel and cologne.

One last anecdote... my friend had clearly been invited to the party with the hopes that he'd hit it off with the token Nice Girl of the group. (Every friend group has at least one; it's the girl who's friendly and reasonably attractive, but can't find a decent boyfriend, so everyone tries to find people to set her up with. Bonus points if she's endured a painful end to a long-term relationship or recently dated a particulary egregious asshole.) In this case, the Nice Girl was indeed nice, but had zero personality. Ask her a question? Get a one-word answer. Tell a story that might prompt her to share something? Get a polite laugh followed by an expectant silence. Ugh. Anyhow, my buddy committed the ultimate faux pas... he ditched the Nice Girl in favor of the Younger Girl With the Low-Cut Top, who works with the core friend group but doesn't usually hang out with them. Which worked out well for him, but probably ensured we wouldn't be invited back for next year's party, and also led to a horrendously awkward scene later at the bar. At one point, I ended up sitting between the Nice Girl and the chill guy who had come to the party with the Younger Girl and clearly hoped he would be going home with her. My buddy and Younger Girl were making out a few feet away on the dance floor, and I got to watch the people on either side of me realize their evenings would end in disappointment. I briefly kicked around the idea of trying to introduce them, but settled for rubbing my wedding ring and muttering a prayer of thanks.