Surviving the Season of Parties

CEBU, Philippines – Parties how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways. There’s the dressing up for them. There’s the getting to them. There’s the being at them. The getting back from them. The meeting of strangers. Or people you know. There’s the not being at home. There are an awful lot of things.

When I receive an invitation to a party, I feel like the Irishman being asked for directions in the old joke. “Well,” I think to myself, looking at my unshaved legs, wardrobe full of unsuitable clothes, drawer full of tangled, laddered tights, lack of car, lack of cash on hand for taxi and all the rest of it, “I wouldn’t start from here.”

Parties have been the bane of my life since childhood. It was never difficult to distinguish between little Lucy Mangan and a ray of sunshine at any schoolmate’s birthday. Expressionless of face, unmoving of limb and mutinous of heart, I would stand in the corner counting off the minutes until it was time to go home. Occasionally I would pluck up the courage to ask an adult if I could go somewhere else to read. The answer was always no.

My teenage years were, as they always are, even more mortifying. This was when I discovered that not only could I not play nicely with others, I also couldn’t dance or interest anyone in me romantically. My parents insisted I keep going out, which culminated, one night when I was about 15, in my mother screaming at me in the hall: “You’re going to that disco if I have to drag you there myself!” She did. I was back home by half 9:30.

As you get older, of course, your autonomy increases and matters improve. But they’re still not great. Part of my problem, I concede, is laziness – staying in is simply easier than going out – and this is something I should work to overcome. Lazy people should be dragged off the sofa and towards the fun zone just as they are dragged to the washing machine to do a load of laundry or to the fridge to start making dinner. If we don’t fight against such weaknesses, nothing would get done at all.

Then there’s rage. Part of me believes parties are for people who need a pretext to pretend to enjoy themselves. This forced nature of it all revolts me. “Why,” I want to snarl at them all, “are you being like this? Why just for now? And why, above all, in sequins?” And of course beneath that, as there is beneath most anger, is sheer bafflement. I am closer to understanding some kinds of murderer than I am the genuinely enthusiastic partygoer. Is it them, I wonder? Or is it me?

What are conspicuous by their absence from this list of ingredients that make up the sunken cake of my temperament are any sense of either shyness or social anxiety. As a child and teenager, I think they probably played an aggravating part – but not now. A roomful of people is a roomful of people. I may feel or even be their physical, intellectual or social inferior, but I don’t care. From the moment I got the invitation I didn’t want to go. Who is actually there on the night is immaterial. They might be lovely, they might be a roomful of turds in suits and cocktail frocks. I might have a good time in the end, I might not. I still want to go home. I still, au fond, want never to have come. It wrecks my head, it upsets my equilibrium and leaves me mentally and bodily fatigued for a week.

This, according to Sophia Dembling, author of “The Introvert’s Way,” is at the heart of it. I’m not a shy flower or a creeping misanthrope or a lazy pig – or at least not all of me is, and not all the time – but an introvert. “The working definition of an introvert is someone who loses energy by interacting socially,” she tells me. “An extrovert gains energy from it.” I contemplate this in silence for a moment. “I don’t believe you,” I say. “It’s true,” she says. “I keep a panel of extroverts for research purposes and they say that they get depressed if they don’t get to go to parties and meet lots of people. They actually get unhappy.”

So it’s me and them. “Introverts just don’t have the motivation to go to parties,” says Dembling. “It’s just not our idea of a good time. And we’re no good at small talk. The world is not our friend. We like to meet people we already know, so we can skip past all that and engage properly.”

This, I should point out, was not the conversation of two introverts humble bragging. The subtext was not “Oh, we’re so clever and deep, we don’t do chitchat!” but one of regret, that there is an avenue of experience and delight closed off to us. Because as psychotherapist (and extrovert’s extrovert) Philippa Perry puts it: “Small talk is the gateway to bigger talk. It’s not about the content, it’s a way of saying, ‘I’m friendly. Are you friendly?’ You could try asking this instead of exchanging pleasantries about the weather. I’m up for it if you are.”

So what can the introvert do to survive the party season? Dembling advises finding yourself a job to do, like dispensing drinks, so the focus is on that rather than on the socializing itself. Or find a corner that – however much your instincts urge you otherwise – is not too out of the way, and engage with the people who pass by. Or you could – and stay with me here – start holding parties yourself, on your terms. I know one woman who holds a “leftovers party” sometime between Christmas day and the New Year.

Both introverts and extroverts benefit from freedom from relatives with whom they have been cooped up over Christmas, and from the pressure to show off with gourmet courses (the leftovers are of the edible kind – not lovelorn folk wreathed in misery). And everyone can revel in the party as either a post-yuletide, pre-New Year’s Eve bonus celebration or as a brilliantly low-key substitute for both.

But above all, Dembling says, you should learn to honor your own degree of introversion (or indeed shyness, anxiety, fear or misanthropy). Husband your limited social resources. If you know there’s a do coming up at the weekend, make sure you stay in the week before and that there’s plenty of recovery time afterwards.

“You have a duty to go to these things, because other people want to see you,” says Perry, author of “How to Stay Sane.” I should note that she is a preposterously generous-hearted woman and that we have never been to a party together. “Make the audacious presumption,” Perry suggests, as if she has read my mind, “that everyone is pleased to see you and would like to get to know you. You’ll be more likely to hold your head up and smile, and then it will in all likelihood become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

And try to remember that all those people trying to drag you on to the dance floor are not evil seekers after your pain. They’re just extroverts. They are, really, having a good time and they want you to have one, too. It’s not their fault they’ll never understand that you’re an unyielding case of can’t-not-won’t.

My own advice, for what it’s worth, gathered over nearly 40 years of tear-stained party-going, is that if you drink, then drink. If you smoke, smoke. If you take pills, take pills. Retreat to the loo for 10 minutes out of every 60. Don’t forget your book. Don’t marry an extrovert.

Going out, and then staying out, gets easier with practice. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then, when it becomes all too clear that you can never be reformed, as W.C. Fields – that hero of every introvert and misanthrope – put it, “Quit.” No use being a damn fool about it. Then, within certain well-defined limits and in your own way, have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! (www.theguardian.com)