Friend a total CF and disrespected my house

[Bubbly8382]

Hi

Still fizzing about this and would like some perspective before I either bin this friendship or create further distance.

long and short of it I have a pal who I’ve known over 20+ years and haven’t seen since way before the pandemic.

Ask if they can come up to visit me in me for a couple of days, obviously not a problem.

Its a long trip to mine, 12 hour drive, and they decided to commute by car.

Things started off fine but a few things made my blood absolutely boil.

1. Friend smokes, I don’t and my partner is trying to quit. No issue with them smoking outside, but Friend stood in door way with all internal doors open so smoke drifted back into house making it stink.

2. Friend kept walking about the house belching loudly, when I said ‘excuse me maybe?’ They just laughed and continued doing it.

3. We had a take away one night, fish and chips, so oily wrappers. I have a suede leather sofa (you can see where I’m going) They were given a tray but decided to put the wrapper on the couch, staining it with oil, obviously I was quite upset about it, and I just got a feeble apology and no offer to help clean it, just continued to sit there eating loudly and burping away.

4. Last but by far the worst……
   Friend advised they would be leaving the early hours to get home, again not a problem, and agreed for 5am…… Friend decides to get up at 3am, crash around like a herd of elephants, crashed around the kitchen getting food

(For context the sleeping area in my home is the opposite end from the kitchen on the same floor, but you can close the internal doors and then no one is disturbed)

I obviously angrily got up and made a sarcastic comment along the lines of ‘You’d make a shit ninja’ to which they laughed and said ‘I wasn’t that loud’

My partner and I had work that day, needless to say we were exhausted with our 3am wake up!

Im livid, and I never want them to stay again or at the moment see them again!

AIBU??

There is no need to be offensive. Your mockery of the homeless or people who live in social housing was not necessary.

Thanks @Kingsparkle I live in council housing myself and have been homeless so unlike @Efficaciou5 I would never think to equate those things with being stereotypical of those who are.

My only point to the OP was that I wouldn't have let it get there before saying anything bc it seemed pretty easy to say and stop the annoyance

so 'I have a pal' (not pals) and continued use of the word 'friend' not friends confused you. Got it. Did you think that the replies such as ‘I wasn’t that loud’ were actually said in unison from a group of people due to a few 'they/thems'? How do you manage in day-to-day life?

None of those things sound massively annoying in themselves (I wouldn't give a shit about the belching or getting up early), but can see how cumulatively they'd wind you up. To consider ending your long term friendship seems extreme, but perhaps you were losing interest in it anyway.

it sounds like your friend irritates you and maybe you dont really like them a lot, when we dont like someone EVERYTHING they do irritates you, when its someone you like its easy to overlook things. I think perhaps your friendship has grown apart and its less about their annoying habits and more about them being annoying. i would just distance myself, any plans come up your busy etc and let the friendship fizzle out

Some of these responses are so weird. How can anyone thing YABU?!

The friend sounds rude and slightly entitled, they treated your house like a hotel - did they bring anything with them as a thank you for hosting or turn up and leave empty handed?

Belching is impolite in front of people. I wouldn’t have liked this. I find it disgusting and such bad manners.

Smoking is even worse, inside someone’s house? I would have politely told them to smoke outside and shut the door, non negotiable (ex smoker).

The sofa thing - basic manners would be to offer to clean it and apologise profusely.

YANBU in the slightest.

🙄

@dancinginthesky - I hate the stereotyping of social housing. Everyone I know who lives in social housing works very hard and has lovely clean homes. It was such an unnecessary comment for the poster to make!

Invite yourself to their house and trash it (spilt nail varnish on the carpet etc) with a feeble apology. 😁

I'd never had fish and chip wrappers near the sofa in the first place. Not sure why you'd not unwrap them all and plate it in the kitchen.

They sound horrid uncouth folk.Don't allow them in your house again. YANBU.

Nope - the use of "I have a pal" and the use of the word "friend" did not confuse me at all. It was the unexplained use of "they" that was confusing. If one of my friends comes to visit me, with her family, I would still refer to her as my "friend", but I would refer to the collective visitors as "they". As in, "I've spoken to my friend, and they will be leaving at 3.00 a.m." My friend is still singular, but the family is plural, hence "they". If my friend was noisy in her preparations to leave, but the rest of the family were quiet, on saying to my friend that she had been noisy, she may well reply, "I wasn't that loud." Perfectly reasonable to use the singular in this instance, as "they" (the rest of the family) had not been noisy - only her.

@Zimunya - I can see you have very rigid thinking on this but you aren’t correct. The use of they for a singular person has been happening in English for hundreds of years. Probably not a hill to die on and not really relevant to this thread.

Agreed - not a hill to die on, and not at all relevant to the thread. That's why in my initial post I said that it was confusing (to me, at least) but went on to provide a response to the actual thread question.

That’s not how you behave as a house guest.
Basic manners and respect for your host and their home apply.
Putting oily fish and chip papers directly on a sofa? Who does that anywhere ?

do you routinely burp around loudly?

Do you stain people's furniture?

I'd be more than annoyed with that, it's gross.

Why didnt you 'plate up' the fish and chips in the kitchen rather than give them to them in the wrapper if you were planning on sitting on the sofa. That is just gross to me tbh.

Burping - might be unpleasant to you but, why did you think that by her burping that it was disrespecting your house? Wouldn't bother me in the slightest.

Smoking and smells - is horrible. I would have just asked the first time that she had a cigarette that she would have to go outside into the actual garden and close the doors etc.

Waking up early - a non thing for me if it meant i was able to see a friend that i hadnt seen for 12 years.

@DappledThings I didn't say what I wanted to say very well – maybe I'm the thick one.

What I meant was that the obvious contextual implication is that anonymity is required, or gender is irrelevant here. Even if you don't agree with it, that's the writer's intention. You can say it's annoying/frustrating/confusing for you not to know the gender, but I have no idea how you could mix it up with the writer referring to multiple people.

I didn't say it was confusing, I said it was jarring. It takes me out of the purpose of the post as I'm minded to mentally replace they with he or she because I know OP knows and my wondering why she's writing so awkwardly and unnecessarily is a distraction from the content.

When as a reader I know the writer doesn't know the subject's sex it automatically flows because it's expected and subconsciously I know that and "they" is natural. In this case it is unnatural as the writer does know so it isn't a standard form of using "they".

You are not a horrible person. Your guest would have got on my nerves too. I don't act like that in my own house. They sound annoying.

I think @gemtart was referring to me with her "slow/simple/thick" comment as I said I found the OP's post confusing.

Going wildly off topic.... If I'm reading the subtext of "they is confusing" posts correctly, they could be anti trans etc? Now I have ZERO interest in wading into that particular debate.

But I find it interesting that – even before the backlash against "they", and before I had even heard of the concept of trans – I have always appreciated singular "they" as a way to include women.

I'm in Philosophy and Law, where there are lots of hypothetical situations in every article, submission, judgment or piece of writing. It used to be that only "he" was employed as a default pronoun. Essentially, if a statute elaborated on the human rights any individual had, it would only accord those rights to a man.

Going back further, as a teen I read books about how to prepare for a legal education/career, and I remember that it was always "he" or "him" in examples of law students and professionals...

Come 2023, some people try to write "he or she" or even "he/she", or change it up by switching between "he" and "she" midway through... But I've always found that "they" is most concise and flows best, assuming it's clear the subject is but 1 person (you'd have to be a bit daft to not be able to deduce this). Singular "they" has been used since the beginning of time – not in all fields, but definitely in literature – when anonymity or a hypothetical situation is involved.

Personally to me the anonymity reasoning makes perfect sense. Yes I know the other details are outing but people are rarely consistent, plus those details could have been changed up (to something conceptually similar) as well!

@gemtart this is exactly why I tend to use they a lot. “He” used to be considered the default and I would see it in lots of annual reports etc at work and it would grate.