Dubai: As the weather cools and party season kicks off in the UAE, you might be sending or accepting invites to social dos. However, the usual dread in every such event are the party poopers who spike the mood with a whole of lot negative baggage. Every party has its shares of spoil sports who come in all shades and hues. Larger-than-life, trying to desperately have the spotlight on themselves, they can be mean, petty, selfish to the point of being insufferable. And yet, they get invited to most parties, because they are the rich and famous influencers or happen to be witty raconteurs who plainly add colour and spice to an event. You can’t avoid them so all you need to do is recongise their type and brace yourself to suffer them.
Take a look at the typical five party poopers who are universal to most parties around the globe.
1. The braggers
These come in all shapes and sizes. Dressed to the nines in the latest fashions, flaunting branded watches, ties, shoes and bags, they walk into the party with a definite agenda ie blowing their own trumpet. Their greatest motivating factor is to create a vicarious insecurity in all. So the hubby and wife work to the script. They drop names of people who they met last week, a holiday they plan to go on next week, their kids are either prefects and award winners or just preparing to take off to the most envious Ivy school. What the anorexic wife does not talk about is her extreme diet that makes her instable around food, and the man conveniently forgets to mention his piling overdrafts and bad credit history at business. What is ugly is swept under the carpets and their show blazes with stories of success and achievement to the point of nausea and revulsion. Usually such poopers enter late and leave early so as not to blow their perfect cover that could expose the ugly underbelly.
2. The party hoppers
These couples are sociopath who have so much Fear of Missing Out (Fomo) that they are unable to decline an invite even if it means juggling their time between four social events the same day. The wife is a smooth operator who joins at least half a dozen kitty parties and makes sure she has a large gang of buddies, where she can fish for invites. So come the party season and they embark on a whistle-stop tour of people’s homes. The arrangement of scheduled is in ascending order of importance with the most vital one left for the last. They typically are the first to arrive at party no 1, make small talk, have a couple of canapes and a beverage of choice, never fail to let the host know about their busy schedule, drop names about the string of other party invites, blow kisses and flutter their eyelids, make sure the guys who matter have seen them and hop to the next party, repeat the same routine until they end up at party number No: 4 towards the tail end of early dawn. By then they have enough selfies on social media to let the world know about their absolutely manic social lives. Mostly these are guys who really don’t matter to a party and like rolling stones, they bluster through the social circuit without really gathering any real circle of friends.
3. The gossip mongers
These are the busy-body control freaks in most parties. While these women think they have the right to control the host’s guest list and often make it their business to influence the list, by default they also keep a tab on who gets invited to what, who has repeated a costume. Sidling up to an unsuspecting guests, the lady does not miss a chance to make a snide and snarky remarks like: ‘have hardly seen you around, have you been travelling, you missed Mrs B’s yatch party last week, we had so much fun!” just for the sheer pleasure of seeing the disappointment on the other’s face. Bitching comes naturally to both men and women of this ilk. While women typically cast acerbic comments about the dress, the looks, the weight gain, the repetition of a bag, shoe or garment of another unsuspecting victim, the men tattle about bad business deals of another and take vicarious pleasure in describing the struggles of their rival.
4. The networking beavers
These are the upwardly mobile, over enthusiastic couples looking to inch up the ladder of social hierarchy solely through the power of ‘networking’. The man begins his way through the boy’s exclusive golfing club, draws up the list of people he wants to hobnob with and then ‘arranges’ a game, an inconsequential chat, a stop by at a watering hole, to worm his way through into the exclusive club. The woman too is a smart operator. She first scours the social media to draw up a list of the rich and powerful she wants to socialize with and then kitty by kitty, she moves into the inner circle of ladies, offers her shoulder to the wealthy loner, plays the role of a confidante to gain invite to the close circuit party. The first party invite is always difficult, but once that is done, the lateral party hopping through the same circuit becomes easier and people usually include familiar faces on the guest list. As an insider at a typical Palm Jumeirah social circuit said : “ afterall, we need numbers and names to make our party a hit and we look closely at who gets invited at our neighbour’s party while drawing up the guest list.”
5. The naysayers
These are couples who indulge in blatant negativity with a rarified sense of erudition as though they were consulted by the specialists on every problem that besets the world. Every party has its set of such doom and gloom agents. They claim to be an authority on every country’s economy, they chat so easily about things going wrong in the country, bad business deals, fleeing business families, global recession, coups, uprisings, climate change, rouge traders, nosediving stocks and other dark and grey areas, trying to lend an air of intellectual gravitas to social conversations.
While most of the above people are probably indispensable and necessary evils at every social event. The caution is a statutory warning on how to spot them, suffer them and manage your life without being sucked into depression until the next party!
