Wish you weren't here

Nothing is more annoying than bad houseguests - except for bad hosts

There, she'd said it out loud: the thought so many will only whisper. "I hate being a houseguest." Ann Velenchik, associate professor of economics at Wellesley College, paused for effect. "It's the towels." She scrunched up her face and recalled the time she unwittingly used her host's towel, assuming it had been left in the bathroom for her. "Ewwww."

An imperfect host? Could it be? Conventional wisdom holds that the deficient party in the host-guest equation is always the latter party, with his annoying personal habits and lousy manners. The way the story's traditionally told, summer houseguests - invited though they may be - are the ones in the wrong, tracking in sand, letting the dog escape, backing up the toilet. But guess what? With the summer visiting season in full swing, it turns out the vacation-home owners are no picnic, either.

Some hosts can be very prickly, often for no discernable reason, as Katherine Stewart, a writer, learned the hard way. "I could tell I was getting on her nerves," Stewart said, recalling a visit to a beach house owned by her then-boyfriend's business associate, "but I didn't know why." At the end of the weekend, she got her answer, in list form: Stewart had left fingerprints on the refrigerator, and deposited her bowl and spoon in the sink, and made her bed too late in the day. "I think she didn't like having another woman in the house," Stewart said, pondering the issue in her postmortem.

Open hostilities don't usually break out like that. But even in the breeziest, Crate & Barrel-iest of summer homes, tension can simmer. "Friends have a lovely house on the Cape," L. began, "and they have a no-shoes-in-the-house policy. They have gorgeous hardwood or lush carpeting everywhere but in the guest bedroom, where the thick sisal rug is so fierce it's like walking on razor blades. Even with socks on, we need medical attention.

"We were convinced it was a passive-aggressive anti-guest policy," she continued. "We took on the challenge, though, and this year we outsmarted the killer sisal with our secret bedroom slippers and laughed ourselves to sleep."

Ha ha ha. It's so nice spending time with friends. Or it should be. But ask around, and it's a wonder anyone stays with anyone. There are hosts who make remarks about guests' sleeping habits, particularly those visitors who make the mistake of sleeping later than the host: "Well, I see someone is taking the idea of vacation literally," one host remarked. Others comment about the length of showers, recycling faux pas or, in one case, the way a guest chopped scallions. "I always use the green part the white is so pungent," the host said, relieving the guest of her duties.

Why all the tension during what - on the surface - looks like a nice weekend away? Alain de Botton, author of "Status Anxiety," sees a "power play going on in any guest/host scenario.

"The host has a country house, the guest doesn't," he wrote in an e-mail. "The guest is therefore in some way an economically or practically weaker party. Furthermore, the guest has been chosen for precisely this reason by the host. After all, an equal wouldn't accept an invitation: an equal would be at his or her house with his or her own guests."

And those guests, in turn, would be complaining about him or her.

"Once the invitation has been taken up," he continues, "the inferior guest has to 'work for his or her supper' has to be deferential and primarily grateful, repressing natural holiday urges to sit around grumpily and not help with practical chores and turn down invitations to local attractions. The guest is 'on duty.' Instead of money, guests pay for their presence with liveliness and flattery."

It's enough to make a person go to the extreme measure of paying for accommodations - in cash, not hostess gifts. And in fact, some do. The Blue Harbor House Inn in Camden, Maine, for example, regularly gets guests who have friends in town - and would like to keep it that way. "We're so glad we found you," they quietly tell inn owner Annette Hazzard. "This works out much better."

Where have we gone wrong as a society, that the simple act of staying with friends is as stressful as . . . well, visiting relatives during holidays? Liz Pryor, author of "What Did I Do Wrong? When Women Don't Tell Each Other the Friendship is Over," sees overscheduling as a culprit. Most people buy a second home because they want someplace to relax, she explains, only to find themselves with more obligations than they have during the rest of the year.

"It becomes the summer from hell," Pryor says. "You have to have family, in-laws, and by the time I come, that person is pretty sick of having guests."

One solution: book early in the season.

But other problems can still lurk: "It's the control freakness," says Sally Horchow, co-author of "The Art of Friendship." "We're all used to doing things in our way, particularly in our free time. We all need to get certain things out of a weekend or vacation. One person has to exercise or they go crazy. The other person needs to sleep 10 hours." And never the twain shall spend the weekend in the same house.

So what's the answer? You could turn down an invitation. But for many people, the only thing worse than enduring a weekend at a friend's summer place is not having it to endure.