Dads-To-Be Say Goodbye To Fun With "Dadelor Parties"

Well, now we have a plot for The Hangover III: in a new trend, fathers-to-be are apparently going out for a booze-soaked last hurrah with their buddies before they become totally lame. Friends, meet the “dadelor party.”

Such parties, according to the Huffington Post, take a variety of forms:

Some permutations are more subdued, like a “diaper keg” where men bring diapers in exchange for beer, while others are more extravagant and involve all day bar-hopping or even a destination weekend. All seem to involve drinking, sporting events, gambling, and more drinking.

So basically a bachelor party, except the dude is about to marry a baby. And as bachelor parties are meant as a goodbye to the strippers and beer bongs that are every unattached guy’s birthright, one man describes the dadelor bash as a “farewell from the inner circle,” presumably because once a guy has a baby he descends into a black hole of bottles and vomit and is never heard from again. Also, in this black hole there is no sex — says Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project, “When babies come along, it tends to make a much more dramatic shift in the wife’s focus. It’s to some degree traumatic for your average husband.”

The idea that guys need a special party to ease them into a time when their wives won’t be paying exclusive attention to them is a little annoying. But actually, there’s a compelling argument that dadelor parties are on the rise because dadness is. Says Carley Roney of TheBump.com,

In the (19)50s it all fell on the girls. Now, it’s a shared responsibility. Guys are just as overwhelmed by the thought of how much their lives are going to change. This is the antidote to that, the hedge against it.

Sure, not every life milestone has to be celebrated with drunken bumbling (one guy discusses how at a Pittsburgh dadelor party, one friend ended up in Ohio). But it’s nice that increasingly, men seem to be taking their responsibilities as fathers seriously, and acknowledging that when the baby comes, it’s not just the mother’s life that’s going to change. It’s good that guys are recognizing that fatherhood is serious business — even if it takes them a few beers to do it.