A bachelor party is a rite of passage of sorts. For many grooms, it's their last hurrah. Their last chance to hang out with the boys. Their last taste of exuberant freedom before the mantle of adult responsibility lays heavily on their shoulders, weighing them down like a stone, slowly crushing them until the last flickering of youth's flame is smothered out of existence.
And if you're already married and you have a friend who invites you to a bachelor party — called a "stag do" in the United Kingdom — you get a chance to watch and pretend you're still young, remembering what it was like in your carefree glory days of bachelorhood.
Recently, a woman in Scotland took to Facebook to share her concerns about a bachelor party her husband wanted to attend. And to ensure he was roundly mocked by all his friends.
She wrote, "I'm more than happy for him to go, but we are Christians, so I was thinking of writing a list of rules for all the men to follow."
Go back and read that again. She wrote a list of rules for all the other men in the party to follow. Because nothing makes all your friends hate your wife more than her telling all her husband's friends how they should behave.
Also, was it because she's a Christian that she wrote a list of rules? It's been done before.
After all, we are a religion that loves its rules and "thou shalt nots," so I can understand why her first impulse was to come up with a special list designed to suck the fun out of everyone else's evening.
It's one thing if she created these expectations for her own husband. That's his own family situation: He made his own bed and he can either lie in it or sleep on the couch.
But as a lifelong rebel, I can tell you that if anyone ever gave me this list of rules, I wouldn't follow them, I would use them as a scavenger hunt.
In fact, of her 10 rules — told you! — eight of them started with the word "No."
At the top of the list was "no illegal drugs," which I'm actually okay with. At the very least, you don't want your idiot husband and all his idiot friends to accidentally get caught up in a heroin smuggling ring during a bachelor party. So I'll give her that one.
The next two were a little more restrictive and frankly none of her business: No cigarettes ("hubby quit, so I don't want the temptation") and no alcohol ("hubby doesn't drink and alcohol leads to bad choices.")
This isn't just her keeping her husband away from these things, she doesn't want the other men to have them either. I'm not a smoker, and I don't drink that much, but if someone banned me from drinking and smoking, I'd walk around with a whiskey barrel on my shoulder and a fat cigar clenched in my teeth.
Number six was just sheer craziness and was grounds for the rest of these guys to kick the husband out of their friend group: "All phones need to be tracked at all times."
I don't even let my own wife track my phone, so there's no way in hell I'm letting anyone else's wife track it. I'll tell you where I'm going, and if you believe me, that's great. If you don't, then I have serious questions about where this relationship is heading.
Unless you pull this "no smoking and no drinking" nonsense, because then we're going to a cigar bar owned by an international drug cartel.
Numbers 7 and 8 made me think my mom wrote the list because they included "No swearing" and "Everyone home by midnight."
I suppose it's a good thing you made number 7 a rule, because I was gearing up a few choice words about number 8. This is clearly someone who still uses the phrase "on a school night."
Who are you to tell me what time I need to get home? If you want your own husband to come scampering home when the street lights come on, that's up to you. But these two rules are enough to make me ban the groom from his own bachelor party.
The woman asked her friends for their feedback, and apparently most of them told her what they thought, apparently reminding her that it's not up to her to tell other grown men how they can and can't behave.
So she amended her post and wrote, "Okay guys, I have taken your feedback and you're right. I can't control him once he leaves the house and I can't control his friends, so I've decided to just not let him go."
It's probably for the best. This way, she can keep her husband at home where I'm sure she's got a bigger set of rules carved on a couple stone tablets.
Photo credit: JW1805 (Wikimedia Commons,Public Domain)
My new humor novel, Mackinac Island Nation, is finished and available on Amazon. You can get the Kindle version here or the paperback version here.
And if you're already married and you have a friend who invites you to a bachelor party — called a "stag do" in the United Kingdom — you get a chance to watch and pretend you're still young, remembering what it was like in your carefree glory days of bachelorhood.
Recently, a woman in Scotland took to Facebook to share her concerns about a bachelor party her husband wanted to attend. And to ensure he was roundly mocked by all his friends.
She wrote, "I'm more than happy for him to go, but we are Christians, so I was thinking of writing a list of rules for all the men to follow."
Go back and read that again. She wrote a list of rules for all the other men in the party to follow. Because nothing makes all your friends hate your wife more than her telling all her husband's friends how they should behave.
Also, was it because she's a Christian that she wrote a list of rules? It's been done before.
It's one thing if she created these expectations for her own husband. That's his own family situation: He made his own bed and he can either lie in it or sleep on the couch.
But as a lifelong rebel, I can tell you that if anyone ever gave me this list of rules, I wouldn't follow them, I would use them as a scavenger hunt.
In fact, of her 10 rules — told you! — eight of them started with the word "No."
At the top of the list was "no illegal drugs," which I'm actually okay with. At the very least, you don't want your idiot husband and all his idiot friends to accidentally get caught up in a heroin smuggling ring during a bachelor party. So I'll give her that one.
The next two were a little more restrictive and frankly none of her business: No cigarettes ("hubby quit, so I don't want the temptation") and no alcohol ("hubby doesn't drink and alcohol leads to bad choices.")
This isn't just her keeping her husband away from these things, she doesn't want the other men to have them either. I'm not a smoker, and I don't drink that much, but if someone banned me from drinking and smoking, I'd walk around with a whiskey barrel on my shoulder and a fat cigar clenched in my teeth.
Number six was just sheer craziness and was grounds for the rest of these guys to kick the husband out of their friend group: "All phones need to be tracked at all times."
I don't even let my own wife track my phone, so there's no way in hell I'm letting anyone else's wife track it. I'll tell you where I'm going, and if you believe me, that's great. If you don't, then I have serious questions about where this relationship is heading.
Unless you pull this "no smoking and no drinking" nonsense, because then we're going to a cigar bar owned by an international drug cartel.
Numbers 7 and 8 made me think my mom wrote the list because they included "No swearing" and "Everyone home by midnight."
I suppose it's a good thing you made number 7 a rule, because I was gearing up a few choice words about number 8. This is clearly someone who still uses the phrase "on a school night."
Who are you to tell me what time I need to get home? If you want your own husband to come scampering home when the street lights come on, that's up to you. But these two rules are enough to make me ban the groom from his own bachelor party.
The woman asked her friends for their feedback, and apparently most of them told her what they thought, apparently reminding her that it's not up to her to tell other grown men how they can and can't behave.
So she amended her post and wrote, "Okay guys, I have taken your feedback and you're right. I can't control him once he leaves the house and I can't control his friends, so I've decided to just not let him go."
It's probably for the best. This way, she can keep her husband at home where I'm sure she's got a bigger set of rules carved on a couple stone tablets.
Photo credit: JW1805 (Wikimedia Commons,Public Domain)
