Hopefully Helpful Advice

Hi GNP-X,

I’m getting married in a couple of months, and while most of the planning is running pretty smoothly, I do have one concern about the day.

My mum and sister enjoy a bit more than a tipple, which most of the time is fine. I love to drink, my whole family loves to drink, and all of my friends like to drink. But at my engagement party, they both got a little bit too messy. They’re mostly pretty good drunks, a bit swaying and slurring, but the wedding is going to be a long day with an open bar tab, and I fear that one or both of them will be cut off or carried out before the cake is cut. 

Is there a way I can ask them not to get fall-down drunk without sounding like a precious teetotaller?

 – Not A Precious Teetotaller

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Dear NAPT,

Who is a wedding for? The answer to this question seems to fall into two camps: a wedding is about the two people getting married. Or, a wedding is about everyone else except the two people getting married.

When you talk to people who are married and who had a big shindig with dozens of friends and relatives and friends of relatives and people who have — Who even is that person? A high school friend of my mother? — travelled vast distances across the world, they often sing a familiar tune when recalling the day: which is that, essentially, they can’t.

It’s all a glorious blur of family and stress and colour and STRESS and food and booze and stress and STRESS BOOZE and music and PEOPLE and STRESS AND BOOZE and fun and love and booze and more dancing and BOOZE. It’s like being zinged around in a dodgem car for 7-8 hours, with every person who matters most to you in the world careening around beside you getting increasingly wasted, as you enter into a very serious and legally binding agreement with another human being to be held for the rest of your natural lives.

Weddings are heady events! Unless you are a very exceptional creature of fortune whose family displays pristine mental health that is the envy of the Brady Bunch (and these people exist! I attended their wedding recently), then a wedding essentially assembles a giant powder keg of potential emotional detonations wherever you step. Just think how crazy a wedding can seem on paper: how to navigate family politics without offending anyone; MONEY; pressure. Add alcohol, shake well, and hope for the best!

It is, however, almost certainly always worth the insanity of the lead-up for the payoff. I am yet to attend a truly monstrous wedding. And yes, people get drunk. Very drunk. There is almost always “that person” at a wedding who should really have called it quits several cocktails ago — or at least eaten more than a single hors d’oeuvres before deciding on a liquid lunch (and dinner). But generally it is preferred that “that person” is not someone from your immediate close family and rather a distant cousin or the weird guy your dad used to work with. So here is my advice to you:

It sounds like this is going to be very straightforward. You say that your mum and sister are pretty fun drunks and that you all, as a family, enjoy kicking loose. So all you have to do is ask them nicely and I’m pretty sure they will respect your wishes — especially as you have the recent evidence of the engagement party to bolster your case.

You only need to take them aside and chat with them frankly: “Ladies, I know we all like a tipple. But on this one day I’m really going to need you to be some steady support for me. So, please let’s agree that we won’t go crazy at the bar until after all the formalities are concluded, and after that, it’s open season. This is a big day, and I want us all to enjoy (and hopefully remember) it.”

Best wishes for a wonderful day with your soon to be husband, and a long and fruitful and meaningful life together with your newly joined families.

G-NPX.

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My flatmate keeps inviting friends over for impromptu drinking sessions that go til all hours. I don’t want to be a dick about it, but it’s really starting to bother me. How should I approach this?

— Not A Dick

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Dear NAD,

Wow, two questions about drinking. Do you think that as a nation we have a problem with alcohol? Perhaps we can address that one specifically at another time through a less rhetorical device. But for now: Flatmate Relations.

Living with other people in your 20s (I’m just assuming!) is one of those scenarios in which life really hands things to you backwards. How youth is wasted on the young. It’s hard to keep on top of all the things you are trying to keep on top of, like how to pay the rent and what to do with the next 50 years. Then add to this the fact that your fine interpersonal skills are still developing, and it’s easy to see in hindsight how those filthy dishes ended up under the sink in the upstairs bathroom when you asked your flatmate to finally wash them after three weeks.

Short answer: it’s your house too. It is your house equally. You need to respect the other person’s space and boundaries and be reliable and responsible to each other. In this case, your flatmate is over the line (please point to this column as proof in resolution of this dispute). Of course they are welcome to bring friends over to drink and hang out – on weekend nights, not on nights when you have to be up for work the next morning. Also it would be polite for your flatmate to let you know they are planning to bring some people over this Friday night, and is that okay? Learning how to live with other people in harmony is pretty much the number one lasting skill you are going to pick up at this point in your life.

Listen up, flatmate of letter writer: Stop being a dick, and don’t be an inconsiderate jerk. If you want to drink late into the night with your friends, that’s what bars that are open late are for. If it’s too expensive for you to do that, then go and drink in a park like a hobo and think about your priorities. If you aren’t going to respect your flatmate’s boundaries, then maybe you need to look at finding a more appropriate place to live, or another flatmate (rules here: whoever moved in last must move out in the case of unresolvable problems).

Hopefully you are both adult enough to talk to each other calmly about this and not get upset like five year olds. But if one of you is not there yet, WHEEEEEEEE, HAVE FUN!!

G-NPX.

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Got  a problem? Send it in: [email protected] — the email will be read only by G-NPX, and you will be kept anonymous.