How Not to Plan

My good friend SH was here for a long weekend trip from Chicago. Instead of staying with me this time, she is stayed with the guy she met when she was here in March. Which is cool, their budding relationship seems to be going well and that's a good thing.

But I am a bit annoyed at the lack of planning that occurred around this trip. I figured she'd be spending most of her time with him, and that was fine. But all of her time with him? This is where I start to get cranky. Before she came I tried to schedule time that we could meet up. Her response was she didn't know what R (the guy) was planning. Fine. But what about what she was planning? Why did it have to be left up to him?

As it turns out he took her for a really nice spa break Friday/Saturday. And all along I'd been saying how about dinner on Saturday? But somehow that message didn't sink in. Even though I said 'dinner on Saturday' about a million times. Somehow when they showed up, not only were they not initially eating, but in an hour they had to meet a group of his friends.

Excuse me?

I don't really understand how this happened exactly except that there was clearly no conversation or communication about what either of them would have liked when it came to the other people they know. I understand that he wants his friends to meet her. But she also has friends that she wants to meet him. And catch up with. So why on earth would one schedule Saturday night and Sunday night for both groups and expect them to mingle and mix and be satisfied? I mean, usually you would expect each person to meet each others friends, then maybe they talk about a mixed group of friends- like who might be suited to socialize with each other, not just throwing everyone together and hope that it works out okay. What is painfully obvious is that with a single conversation it would have been very easy to say, lets hang out with my friends Saturday and your friends Sunday and that way everyone has time to really talk and get to know who they should.

As it turns out, his friends came to where I'd booked for dinner, but it was on the table next to ours. So R was clearly stressed about being between his friends and our table, so that wasn't very pleasant. And it really was an our table and their table, which also wasn't very pleasant. And oh, out of the eleven people present, I was the only one not in a couple. So I found that particularly annoying and unpleasant, especially when the couples started being smarmy.

So I've begged out of this evenings dinner. I'm really in no mood to go hang out with a bunch of suburbanized married couples who all know each other and who all want to meet my friend. Nope, not in the mood at all. So I'm sure SH is pissed off at me, but I don't really care. I did get to see her last night and managed to monopolize a good deal of her time, and I think it's fair that she meet R's friends as well. I just really wish they had taken a second to be reasonable and plan it better. Then last night could have been a lot more fun, and tonight wouldn't have this overtone over it.

Rant over.