Social Minefield: How To Behave On A Birthday
LatestToday in Social Minefield, our column on the joys and terrors of human interaction, we provide some tips and tricks for one of the most socially challenging occasions of the year: the birthday.
Obviously, how you should behave on a birthday depends a lot on whether it’s yours or not. We’ll start with the former. If you ARE the birthday girl/boy…
Be cool.
This may seem general, but if you can follow this one simple rule, everything will be fine. To get a little more specific: despite what Lesley Gore says, if you can avoid crying, yelling, fighting, or generally getting pissed off, your birthday will be way better. Someone got you a shitty present? Laugh it off, and have a drink. Some killjoy refuses to sing? Laugh it off, and have another. Someone brought an annoying guest? Laugh it off, and drink all the good stuff before she gets any. As I mentioned last week, your own birthday party is a great time to get drunk, if you like that kind of thing, and singing, telling stupid stories, and vomiting are not only acceptable — your friends pretty much have to indulge you. But if you start shit with someone, or get mad at a loved one over a birthday slight, you’re just going to taint your special day with bad mojo. And even if you remember nothing else from the night, you will remember that.
If you’re going to have a birthday dinner, consider your guests.
As Chiara Atik points out, “If you’re going out for someone’s birthday, you will all pay for the birthday person. Duh.” So if you are the birthday person, don’t pick a place that’s wildly out of any of your guests’ price range. Also, consider keeping your dinner guest list short. As Slate‘s John Swansburg once noted, a big birthday dinner (to my mind, anything above six), is going to leave someone seated in Siberia, unable to talk to you. This is bad for your guests, but it’s also bad for you, because you’ll sacrifice some of the key advantages that a dinner has over a party — intimacy, and coherent conversation. A small dinner with a few close friends, followed by a blowout at your house or a bar, combines the best of both worlds.
If you want something specific from your loved ones, say so beforehand.
If you care a lot about how your birthday goes down — and I do, so no judgment here — consider mentioning a few specifics to your friends beforehand. Obviously you don’t want to make demands, but there’s nothing wrong with letting your nearest and dearest know what your favorite cake flavor is, or that you’d really like everyone to sing at midnight. Also, this is a good time to bring up anything that didn’t go well the previous year. If you were annoyed that your best friend brought a posse of street performers/Scientologists/libertarians/graduate students last year, give her some kind instructions this time around. This is way better than making a scene at the actual event.
Say thank you.