Can I Disinvite Friends from a New Year's Bash?

Socializing in general is a never-ending festival of “hurt feelings and awkwardness.” Why should New Year’s Eve be any different?

Writing in the Globe and Mail, David Eddie hears from a reader wondering if they can disinvite their friends from a New Year's Eve party.

The reader writes:

Hubby and I have become close friends with a couple, Amber and Bill. They’re hosting a small New Year’s Eve get-together and told me I could invite anyone I wanted. We recently introduced them to some other dear friends of ours, Clare and Dan. The six of us have now spent several Saturday evenings socializing. A couple of weeks ago, Clare and Dan mentioned they’d love to spend New Year’s with us, and I said, “Great, Amber and Bill are having a party. Wouldn’t that be fun if you two came?” A more socially astute person might have double-checked with the hosts, but the combination of “invite whomever you want” and “we really like your friends” made me think I was in the clear. The following day, Amber told my husband that she wouldn’t feel comfortable if Clare and Dan were at the party. I’m having trouble foreseeing a future that doesn’t involve hurt feelings and awkwardness.

Eddie responds:

Socializing in general is a never-ending festival of “hurt feelings and awkwardness.” Why should New Year’s Eve be any different?

Listen to me. What have I become?

In my twenties and thirties, I loved to mix and mingle. I turned nothing down but my collar. I’d go to the opening of a phone booth, an outhouse, an elevator. (Not hyperbole: I went to the opening of an elevator once, in an upscale shopping mall. Free wine, good snacks, lots of swish society babes – it was fun!) These days, though, in the words of Henry de Montherlant, I prefer to “retire on the shady side of 40 with a few choice friends.”

And parties sometimes seem like gratuitous, halitotic congregations of bores and stiffs, underminers and the “overrefreshed.” The other night, at a friend’s house, I thought I was having a pleasant enough conversation with a sabre-toothed divorcee (genus smilodon fatalis), until I realized her agenda was to zing and shiv me at every opportunity and pepper me with “questionsults”. “Does Pam” – my wife – “dye her hair?” “Are you feeling thin, Dave?” To Pam, re: a tiny, army-issue cross I wear around my neck, “Really? Jewellery on a man?”

On and on it went. Me wondering: “Why do I subject myself to this? I could be sitting at home, in front of the fire, with a bourbon and a good book.”

Anyway, that’s my problem. On to yours. If I were you, I would sit down and have a chat with Amber over, say, a glass of chardonnay (or two), and gently probe to see if you can find the source of her discomfort vis-à-vis your friends. Was there some intercouple friction or frisson or flirtation? Does she feel threatened or undermined?

If it’s nothing too dire, perhaps you can find a way to broker peace between the two parties. (I know there’s not a lot of time left. But it’s not too late yet, I hope. In even the most long-standing of feuds, peace is sometimes only a cup of tea, a frank discussion and a hug away.) If it’s something more serious – if, say, Clare stole a diamond necklace from Amber’s dresser, or Dan got drunk and defecated in their cat’s litter box – well, then, that’s a little more ticklish, obviously. ...

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