Advanced adulting: The reliable salve for a wounded relationship

On the “grown-up” bingo card, there are a few important abilities to acquire: doing taxes, flossing, eating vegetables. Then there’s a tier of skills I like to think of as Advanced Adulting. These are things we all know we should do, but few of us make time for.

Writing thank-you cards is one. Author David Sedaris apparently sends a handwritten note after every meaningful interaction. That means he is not only funnier than everyone else, he’s also nicer.

Very few relationships cannot be repaired with a lavish gift.Credit: Stocksy

Another is mastering the art of being a good house guest. Because when you’re a good house guest, chances are you’ll get invited back. But achieving this is also much harder than it looks, and practice doesn’t necessarily make perfect.

My first stints as a house guest came in the form of much-coveted sleepover invites as a tween. I was terrible at it. The night would start on a high note. Very high notes, to be precise, as we gathered around the boombox to listen agog to Mariah Carey’s Daydream on cassette.

The night would progress with makeovers, ghost stories and then abruptly end as one of the guests – me – inevitably used her friend’s snazzy cordless phone to call her parents and ask to be picked up. As Mariah sang, And then a hero comes along, with the strength to carry on …

The next week at school, I’d hear about everything I’d missed in my hasty retreat: the identity of the boy in class everyone had a crush on, who was always called Ben because this was 1995 and there were four Bens in the class; the attempted séance; the pancakes in a shake container made by the host’s mum the next morning.

A gift for those who have hosted us, sent at an appropriate delay, is a powerful bridge builder.

Youth, as opposed to childhood, is an easier time to be a good house guest. You are thrilled to be invited to someone else’s place because your own is generally a hovel. You are happy to eat whatever food someone else prepares for you because your own cooking skills are limited to “French bread pizza” in the toaster oven. Milk you drink at someone else’s house no longer tastes weird. And you are, most importantly, in a stage of life where routines are blissfully flexible.

Stay up debating capitalism and its ills until 3am? No problem. Be ready to hit the trendy cafe before the crowds at half-past seven in the morning? Tough, but nothing a coffee won’t fix.

I regret to say that my house guesting has taken a turn for the worse since becoming a parent. Last summer, some lovely child-free friends invited us to their impeccably decorated beach house, a Nancy Meyers wonderland of cream-coloured couches and Ming vases. You know where this is going.

After one night and only a handful of broken china, we left. It was like I was 12 all over again. The one thing we can be sure of is that a gift for those who have hosted us, sent at an appropriate delay, is a powerful bridge-builder/apology/reinforcer of bonds. After the beach-house stay, I whipped out my credit card and sent the owners some fancy cocktail napkins.

I did not skimp: they were from the kind of shop which monograms by default.

This, too, is another powerful lesson of adulthood. Very few relationships cannot be repaired with a lavish gift. It wasn’t Mariah who sang these lines, but they’re equally memorable: Brown paper packages tied up with strings, these are a few of my favourite things!

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