You’re brave enough to tell people to get off the couch and socialize, but are you brave enough to tell people to stay in their hometowns for their bachelor parties?
I’ve long had a pet peeve with what I’m now calling the Great Trippification (partly inspired by the comments of 𝕏Molly Fleck on Twitter.) While people are throwing fewer parties overall, it seems that those who can afford it are more likely to celebrate birthdays, bach parties and weddings with big, splashy, multi-day trips with a smaller number of guests, which are often cumbersome and expensive for those invited. These events are nearly uniformly childfree, meaning they exclude moms of infants and force other parents to find (and pay for) safe, reliable overnight childcare if they want to come. Which, even if you are open to it, you may not be able to secure!
I don’t blame individuals for hosting these events, but I do have an issue with the fact that, if you are upper middle class, they have become the standard, often replacing more accessible events. If someone is turning forty, there will be a trip, not a house party. If someone is getting married, you will have to secure multi-night childcare because your ass is going to be on a plane, a ferry, a shuttle, and then stuck on a remote island for three days straight. Of course, you can just not come…but what happens when this is the main type of event that people in your community host?
Before I get the: “nobody is doing that,” rest assured that I’m not going to claim that your median American is doing this, let alone that “everyone” is doing this. This is obviously unique to the affluent. But thinking back to the weddings and adult birthday parties to which I’ve been invited over the past ten years, a significant majority required air travel (often involving remote destinations that required car rentals, ferries or shuttles) and all were childfree. I am, quite literally, the only person I know who had a bachelorette party in her own city.
Of course, on an individual level, people are free to celebrate however they like! But on a macro level, I can’t help but wonder if the expectation that milestones be celebrated not with a party but with a vacation is having unintended negative effects on socialization at large. Many people are less likely to be able to attend these baroque excursions, and by comparison, they may wonder if it’s even worth throwing a humble house party if “everyone else” is booking their friends a flight to Mallorca. And while you can always politely decline, if the cost of being a close friend involves elaborate weekends away, you may very well be dropped for not being able to keep up.
