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Dear Pepper: Swiss Mountains and Molehills


Dear Pepper is a monthly advice-column comic by Liana Finck. If you have questions for Pepper about how to act in difficult situations, please direct them to dearpepperquestions@gmail.com. Questions may be edited for brevity and clarity.

Dear Pepper,

My fiancé and I are moving from the U.S. to Switzerland. We’ve had a lot of people promise to visit—with the implied expectation of staying in our home. I like hosting visitors, and I think it’s nice to do so when someone is shelling out for a pricey flight. But my fiancé doesn’t want guests in our space, especially family members who stay for weeks at a time. How do we compromise and reset the expectations of loved ones who are counting on a free bed-and-breakfast?

Help!
Seeking Neutral Ground

Dear Switzerland,

I’d first like to know if your new home will be large enough to accommodate guests. Do you have a spare room? If not, I️ think your fiancé wins this one.

Assuming that you do have the space, sit down with your fiancé and state what your respective priorities are. It sounds like yours is being gracious to the people you care about, while your fiancé’s is a not-overwhelming home life. I think there is probably room here for both of your needs to be honored.

The next step: discuss each of your ideal situations when it comes to visitors. Does your fiancé want people (but not too many people) to visit you in Switzerland, but not stay with you? Do you want anyone who asks to stay in your home to be welcomed for as long as they want? After that, figure out what’s negotiable. If your fiancé has nine-tenths of the privacy they desire, will they stop feeling descended upon and out of control? If you can invite people to stay for three to five nights, might you feel as good as when extending a completely open invitation?

Finally, work out a set of rules: What’s the maximum amount of time you’d both be comfortable having someone stay? How many visits are you comfortable with per year? How much time do you need between visits? Or maybe you’d like to make a ranking system: close family gets, say, a week, friends get four nights, and acquaintances get zero nights. Put it in writing so that you can both refer back to it. And, to polish the negotiations off, set a date on which to revisit the agreement and see if it’s working for both of you.

One caveat: Is your fiancé really, deeply averse to ever having a house guest? (I️ ask because I️ am. I have terrible social anxiety, a badly behaved dog, and no doors in my apartment—and my husband and I both work from home.) If your fiancé’s like me, I’d suggest that you concede to them on this point, and maybe ask them to try things your way in a different area of life.

Moving on—you might want to find a good alternative for those visitors you can’t put up, and for people who want to stay longer than you want to host them. Maybe Airbnbs near you? Reasonably priced hotels? I’ve heard that Switzerland has some nice chalets and sanatoriums. (I get all my information from nineteenth-century novels.)

So, how to tell people? It’ll be tricky, but only as tricky as setting any necessary boundary—ending a long phone call, leaving a dinner party, or politely declining the third wedding invitation you’ve received for a particular weekend. State your preferences to your guests as soon as they express interest in visiting you, and don’t belabor the point too much. (The first rule of setting boundaries is not to use the word “boundaries.”) Try to put a warm and kind spin on it. “We’ve been having a lot of visitors, which we’re so happy about, but we’re only able to host people in our house/apartment for X number of nights. Y hotel is great if you stay longer than that.” Or, “We already have too many people staying in September, so we won’t be able to host you, but Y hotel is great, and we are excited to have you over for dinner and show you around the Alps.”

And don’t worry if you do this clumsily at first. You and your fiancé have the rest of your lives together to get it right.

Sincerely,
Pepper

P.S. I️ heard that Europe is opening up to Americans again, and I ️have a lot of cancelled-flight credits to use up before 2023. Can I️ come visit?


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