Too old for sleepovers: Why I am giving up being a house guest

At what age are you too old for sleepovers? As a married man in my thirties, you’d think this question had no relevance to me. Why on earth would I still be staying over at friend’s houses?

Almost every time I travel and tell friends I’ll be in their home cities for a few days, they offer to put me up. It’s always a wonderful, genuine offer that I’m thankful to receive; it’s also never an option I want to take up.

There are a couple of reasons why I don’t like staying in my friends’ spare rooms. First, you lose all control of your own schedule when you’re a house guest of a good friend.

If they want to go out to dinner at a fancy restaurant, you are going with them. If they want to watch loud TV until 3am or continue drinking cocktails until dawn (when you want a good night’s sleep), you just have to grin and bear it.

You are also robbed of a place to really, truly relax in another city. Perhaps you are in town for work and have back-to- back meetings, or maybe it’s for pleasure and you spend the whole day on your feet seeing the sights.

When you have a hotel or similar accommodation, you have the luxury of arriving at your room, falling face-down on the plush bed, and decompressing.

At a friend’s house, you have to stay “on”, tell them about your day’s adventures, and prepare to entertain your hosts with stories, anecdotes, and all around great, carefree conversation. You really have to put on a show: they don’t call it “singing for your supper” for nothing.

Unless you’ve visited before, you also don’t know what you’re getting when you accept somebody’s hospitality. I’ve ended up in the worst beds with sheets I knew were unwashed, sleeping on sofas shorter than I am tall, and walking around in the middle of the night in a sweat because the central heating is turned up far too high, or a strange, repetitive foreign noise is making me anxious.

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When you’re on holiday, these aren’t stresses you should endure. But when you commit to staying with a friend, you can’t predict what will be on offer – and you can’t complain about what you get, either.

My husband and I made a pact at the end of our last major vacation that, at 30, we were too old to stay at friends’ houses anymore. We are not prepared for the unpredictability, and, we are not so cheap as to take the free option over paying for a hotel or Airbnb.

When you’re paying for your accommodation, you retain full control. You know exactly what you’ll get and if you have a problem with it, you have the right to speak up.

So that raises the question, how do you politely turn down a friend’s offer of hospitality? It helps when you’re travelling with a spouse because I think it’s entirely acceptable to say, “we like our space, so are going to get a hotel”, and then follow that up with a dinner invite one night.

Other options include putting a bad back first and citing sleeping concerns, noting how your specific dietary requirements are taxing on hosts and you prefer not to burden them, confirming you want to be able to walk everywhere and need central downtown accommodation, or you can just lie (not ideal) and say you’ve already got a place to stay.

It sounds awfully ungrateful to turn away friends’ hospitality, and I don’t blame you for judging me thinking this way.

So here’s one final thing to consider: staying with friends can put your friendships in danger. I can’t count the times where I’ve stayed with people for extended periods and ended up not liking them anymore.

When you stay with somebody they reveal their true selves, and sometimes, that’s not a good thing.

– stuff.co.nz