How many of you woke up at Christmas in a strange bed?
Maybe you spent the break in your childhood home but somewhere in the last few decades your parents turned your bedroom into a sewing room and now you sleep on a fold-out couch that has a weird metal bar in the middle of it that sticks into your back. In the middle of the night you woke up, momentarily freaking out at the bolts of fabric looming over you that appeared, at first glance, to be a group of tall, thin men.
Or maybe you were at your brother’s house and you and your partner were given the children’s car-shaped bunk beds with Batman sleeping bags that barely reached waist-height. The only way you could fit in the bed was to go into the emergency brace position. Your sleep was fitful. You couldn’t relax in this bed. What if you rolled off the top bunk and died?
Maybe you were the one hosting guests and you reached for your favourite (expensive) shampoo only to realise it was ALL GONE because your guests helped themselves. Mystery hair has collected in your razor. Someone drank your special wine.
Or maybe you went away, entrusting your garden and your pet and all your things to a friend who loses her own wallet at least once a week. Your holiday then becomes a stressful refreshing of your phone to see her Instagram stories for pet and garden proof of life.
Or maybe, like me, last week you were the one housesitting, and rose early on the morning of your friends’ return to launder the sheets, remake the beds and water the garden. And clean – only to discover after sweeping the floor and making small piles of dirt, dust, hair and bits on the ground that you could not find a dustpan and brush. And that the slightly sunken floor meant the dirt could not be simply flicked outside with the strong sweep of a broom and how after an hour or so of searching for a dustpan, you had to leave, but all Christmas you were haunted by the spectre of the dirt, scattered in mounds around the house, a houseguest equivalent of taking a dump on the floor (and how could you not imagine your tired jet lagged friends returning to their home, peeling the shoes off their swollen, hot feet and stepping on to a sharp, awful mix of Dorito crumbs, sand and sloughed skin?)
Or maybe you are the sort of family or individual who never has guests and who avoids being a guest, and for whom the hundreds of dollars spent on accommodation or an Airbnb nearby is the best money you’ll ever spend.
Because in each household where there is the promise of a spare room, even in the most relaxed household, there are invisible tripwires and rules that you’ll never guess, the chance of the slight but unexpressed thrum of tension when you drink from the wrong glass or even just the likelihood of a poor sleep on a fold-out couch.
Or maybe you are the sort for whom the offer and/or acceptance of a bed in a friend’s house is in itself a form not only of friendship, but a deepening of it.
That real friendship comes not after the nights at the bar and the barbecues and the shared activities – but this: folding down a couch or clearing out the spare room, stretching out a stiff, freshly washed and line-dried sheet, placing a cup of water on the bedside table and a spare key, and having the same done for you when you are a guest.
Can it really be called a proper friendship without this? Can you say you really know someone if you’ve never seen them in their pyjamas, without makeup, cloudy before coffee and wiping sleep in their eyes?
Yet the hospitable exchange can be fraught. It can be easier to muck up and offend when you are in someone’s house – get them the wrong gift or no gift at all, leave a mess, take things and liberties, get underfoot, outstay your welcome.
Then add kids to the mix and different styles of parenting and the tripwires multiply.
You are more likely to discover a friend’s hard limits when you stay in each other’s houses.
Share the same taste in books and films? Agree on politics? That sort of common ground is easy to establish. But there is other stuff that’s less obvious until you cross the domestic realm.
Are you comfortable with people sleeping in your bed when you’re away? What about people using your bath and shower products? Or razor? Or her toothbrush? (Sorry Mel, I wasn’t wearing my contact lenses.)
Do you want guests to help around the house or provide food? Or is your notion of hospitality broad enough that you don’t want them to lift a finger?
You find all this out when you arrive at the threshold with your overnight bag and the best of intentions.
Brigid Delaney is a Guardian Australia columnist
