House Guest
October 30, 2008 
16 Comments
Whenever you’re a guest at someone else’s house – be it a friend’s or a woman’s – you have to make yourself small. You have to respect their space.
They went out and they bought that furniture with their own money – use a coaster!
If the toilet seat is down when you find it, put it back down before you leave!
If the kitchen is spotless and you make a mess – don’t expect someone else to be your maid!
Don’t leave your dishes and glasses all over the house – are they supposed to clean up after you when you leave?
Volunteer. When you’re a guest at either a friend’s or a woman’s house, offer to take out the garbage. Load the dishwasher.
If they don’t have an extra bedroom and you’re crashing on the couch, put your stuff in a little corner – and make it neat – so it’s not all over the place. You can’t spread yourself out when you’re a guest in someone’s home.
You’re doing so much great work to learn how to meet the opposite sex, but then when you meet them and spend the night at their house, you’re going to turn them off! You want to leave them with a good opinion of you. It’s also good to form these habits.
It’s like the bad driver who comes home at the end of the day and complains that there is nothing out there but mean drivers that honk all day long. No, you’re the bad driver!
If you’ve been a guest at people’s houses before and you’ve never been invited back (yet you still hang out) it’s not that they don’t like you; they just don’t want you to come to their house again!
You have to look at things like this. You want to give people a good impression of you no matter what. Behave in people’s houses! You don’t want your host to have to tell you something five or six times before you get your act together and pick up after yourself.
It’s their house and their rules. Obey them! You have your own rules in your house, and you expect people to follow them.
If you like to keep your house a pigsty, then we’ll all come over and throw banana peels all over the place, we can fart and shit on the toilet seat, and we can stop up the toilet.
You have to realize that you are going to go out there and get the women that you want and then you’re going to have to leave them with a good impression. That impression is something you’re going to fuck up badly if you don’t pay attention to the little things.
Brian: I’m pretty clean, but I could be cleaner. And when someone comes over to my house and they are dirty, it drives me completely insane!
It’s your house – your home – and you’ve worked hard to put stuff in it. You can handle cleaning up after yourself, but you don’t want to clean up after your guests!
David: When my ex-girlfriend Allison and I were living together, my friend Wayne came to LA and wanted to stay with us. He had a cold and was coughing. I was like, dude, no, you have a cold. You’re not staying with us. That’s not cool. Go stay in a hotel. But he swore it was allergies.
Allison didn’t buy it, but I told her that he had promised it was allergies, so we let him stay with us. Three days after he left, Allison came down with the flu and missed a week of work!
If you’re sick, don’t bring it into someone else’s house! If you’re ill, go stay somewhere else.
It’s the little things like this. You just have to respect other people and their boundaries.
People do this all of the time. Rey was sick and coughed all over everyone. And he got a bunch of people sick! He learned his lesson. This respect is so important.
You’ve done so much work – just continue the work and keep respecting other people.
Enough about bad house guests!!!
Dazzle her with a new look and you will become a permanent house guest!!
Ach! And I hate it when someone gets me sick because they didn’t want to miss one stupid day of school. I swear, every quarter there’s at least one joker out there who’ll plop down in the desk next to mine at the last second as class is about to start. The jerk doesn’t even give me any time to get away
Love this post!
If you do have house rules, in addition to picking up after yourself, let people know so they don’t break them! If you don’t let someone know your rules in addition to the common sense ones that David just mentioned, how do they know?
Things that drive me nuts are guests who invite themselves to stay longer, at which point I put on my stern face and say “I don’t think so”, or guests who leave a mess after every place they’ve been, or guests who don’t say “Thank you” when they leave.
I’m generally a very good house guest and expect the same.
I think this is the first time i do not agree with you David! Now i don’t know all the details, well actually i know none of them… But if ur friend Wayne is indeed a good friend and he came from more than a state away expecting to stay with you, even if he’s sick you gotta let him stay there. Thats just being a good friend. But the rest of the post as usual your right on the money.
ya, i definitely grew up with a neat-freak father. Which is a great thing to keep me organized all of the time. So naturally, my room will look like that nearly all the time, unless i just dont have any time.
So naturally, it turns me off when other people do that.
while my room can either look really neat or really messy, i’m definitely a good house guest : )
and i bet David, Khiem and RIch can all attest to that!
I mean, respect is the key here for me. Having respect for others and having some damn respect for yourself. Your reputation and image that you portray will always be under scrutiny no matter what you are doing, which is why the bathroom is one of the most secretive places on earth. Do you really think people want to know what you do in there? Some of the most unattractive things go on in there and no one wants to see that.
Having said that, it’s important that we keep in mind the fact that you need to show respect across every surface. Crashing at someone’s place especially. You get to spend the night with a woman (or a guy), treat their place with respect and you will look so much more attractive, it’s crazy.
I can’t stress this enough. Have respect for yourself and you’ll naturally respect others as well. Put yourself in the brightest light possible all the time. It seems like a lot but it’s rather easy if you care about yourself enough.
Yeah…David you absoolutely right !! We need to be a bit “Sensitive” or “Well Manner” all the times when visiting peoples house.
Ok ok ok, lets talk about the reallll reason for this post, I’ll admit it, its me! David busted my balls during the the last hour of our bootcamp in September and told this monologue. I have learned my lesson, thanks David, I have you in my head telling me sitting on your infamous red chair “BE SMALL”.
House rules? I do not believe in that “mi casa es su casa” (my house is your house) crappola. But I will forgive you for most guest transgressions including not putting the seat down…just flush when you’re done, OK? It’s the little things that make big points…
I forgot to mention – if you want to bring additional heads with you – ASK first! The available space in my big house still has limits and may have others with advance ‘reservations’ – I’m not putting them out just to make room for your posse.
I try to always be a good houseguest as well … I don’t want someone to have to “clean” after I’ve left, so I will bring some cleaning with me (usually have some Lysol wipes in my bag so I can wipe down the bathroom counter) and will offer to help with laundry, dishes or any other chores that are partially necessitated by my stay
Don’t know if this always is being the best guest, but I always hope that it at least shows the host that I’m trying to be
Whenever I go to someone’s house it’s a rule to ALWAYS bring a gift. A bottle of wine, some ice cream, home baked food, some item you know they can use, a gift certificate to a restaurant, whatever. Just something in your hand the minute you show up, no matter if you’re showing up for dinner or to stay for a week.
This is so important. I just finished cleaning up my apartment after having invited a bunch of guys/girls yesterday evening. I must admit that the ones messing most were the girls!! I had lots of cigarette ash and spilled drinks all over my balcony, the loo was as awful as you can imagine and my living room a mixture of rests of spilled drinks, empty glasses and bottles. Actually very little people care about that, so if you really want to stand out, offer a hand to your host after the show ends. Show a little class and you’ll be SO different from all the rest of the world that really doesn’t care.
My mom has always taught me that if I stay over at someone’s place, I should not only help the host but leave the place the way I have found it.
That rule has never failed me to get myself re-invited over and over again.
It’s been 15 days since the last I posted…wow…
Anyways, every terrible house guest should read this blog post. Ever since childhood, my mom has always trained me to never leave a mess uncleaned. Although me and my siblings grew up having a housemaid(that was in the Philippines), mom would always let us do the table cleaning and the dishwashing, and also cleaning up our own room and our closets. She always reminded us that whether we’re at our own home or at someone else’s, we should always get rid of every mess and smell we have caused. Oh and of course, now that we’re all here in the USA, we do every single thing ourselves.
Sometimes I found it so annoying when my mom reminds me to do this and that, but I realized that it was for my own good. I am always a very good house guest no doubt. Everytime I have guests, I always show them where the trash bag is, where the ziplocks are, where the paper towels are, the sprays, the extra trash bags, the clorox wipes, everything. That way, they’d know they’ll have to throw everything that needs to be thrown, and they won’t need to look for me to ask for the cleaning needs.
I hate it when guests come and stay for extended hours and then take up your valuable one hour a day with you parents. in any case an hour is more than enough rather than inconveniencing people to alleviate you own boredom