<p>My daughter’s boyfriend since February will be visiting her for seven days and staying at our home. She has been home working all summer and he is in a different state. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to make him feel comfortable? Also, this is the first serious boyfriend that she has had and I am wondering how to make her feel comfortable hosting him here. She is the youngest child and I am sure she acts more maturely with him than at home with us. She has always been comfortable having her close friends over, but somehow this feels very different. I don’t know why I feel nervous, other than I am a fairly private person and do not like house guests. Any and all suggestions will be appreciated. Thanks! (btw- we haven’t met him before)</p>
<p>Well, I guess you’ll get to know him now! 7 days worth! :)</p>
<p>My advice would be to not hover over him/them but to just work him into whatever routine you already have. Tell D to show him around the house (linens, how the remote works, etc.) Ask D what types of foods he likes/dislikes or any allergies and make plan the first couple of meals to be things you know he likes. If he offers to “help” - with clearing the table or whatever, take him up on it. Try your best to act and do like you normally do. Give him/her privacy when you can. Encourage them to go out on their own and do their own thing (within reason…) so no one feels to much “obligation”. </p>
<p>I’m not much for house guests either. One of D’s friends stayed with us for a month last year during a pharm rotation - and D doesn’t even live in our city anymore - but it all turned out great because we just incorporated her into the family but gave her freedom and space. :)</p>
<p>I work during the week, which was an easy excuse to suggest son and g/f spend a night at the Keys. The hotel was my treat. It broke up the visit. Fortunately, son had friends in town, so the young couple were happy to go out at nights.</p>
<p>My D1’s bf has bonded with our dog. 
It makes him and the dog happy (he is the dog’s favorite person now). So when he comes he immediately walks the dog, brushes her, and pets her far more than anyone else does. He lives a plane ride away, but has come about once a year for the past few years. She is always excited to see him. It also gives him a chore to help with around the house to take her out, feed her, etc. But if your visitor doesn’t like pets (or you don’t have any), I can see how that might not happen with everyone.</p>
<p>I did ask my D about her bf’s eating habits, and made sure I had some cereal he would like and lunch stuff. Sometimes they do stuff on their own (picnics, tennis, movies, out with her friends). And usually I take them out to dinner once while he is here.</p>
<p>Is “comfortable” code for “where does he sleep”?</p>
<p>Is “comfortable” code for “where does he sleep”?</p>
<p>Or where does he sleep before midnight and after 5 am?</p>
<p>Consider giving yourself a break and see if he/they would like to prepare dinner toward the end of his visit. Preparing even something simple–grilling burgers or making spaghetti–would allow him to acknowledge your hospitality by cooking for you. You’d obviously have the ingredients on hand, but they’d do the work. Another thought would be to get them tickets to a sporting event/movie so they can go out and you will have your home to yourself, even for a few hours.</p>
<p>Ask DD about his interests and purchase a couple of magazines for the bedside table in the guest room (I’m making an assumption!). My son and his friends seem to guzzle down the Gatorade when they are hanging out in the basement, so I would also stock the fridge with his favorite soda/beverage. The cereal suggestion is also a good one! (He will know you’ve made an effort to welcome him in other ways, I’m sure.) </p>
<p>If you are members of a gym or community pool, perhaps he might like to have a guest membership while visiting. (Many gyms offer very inexpensive guest memberships.) </p>
<p>In my experience, most young people just want to be treated like a member of the family and don’t want you to ‘make a fuss’.</p>
<p>When we visit my parents, my fiance is a happy boy when my mom buys his favorite snacks-- he loves swiss cake rolls and animal crackers, and cherry pepsi. She makes sure there’s snacks for me, so getting his favorites makes him feel like one of the kids-- and then he doesn’t feel weird about going to the pantry when hes hungry because he knows those were bought just for him. The first few times we went to my parents I think he starved because he was too shy to let himself into the kitchen.</p>
<p>We also like having the opportunity to go out as much as we can to get a break from feeling like a “guest.” We just came back from a 10 day visit with my parents and we were really drained by the time we got home because we hadn’t had any alone time the whole trip. I wish we’d made it a point to go to the movies or something.</p>
<p>After D’s boyfriend stayed here once for a few days, I decided on my new lifetime policy for all of my kids: No opposite sex friend/romantic interest stays in my house, ever–not until after the wedding. (The visit was highly “uncomfortable,” for the entire family.)
Good luck ;)</p>
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<p>Wow. We would have missed out on some very pleasant times with D1’s bf if we had followed this policy over the past four years. I would barely know this young man, who D1 is likely to marry, since their college and his home are several states away from our. And she stays at his family’s house all the time – he lives near her college, while we are several hundred miles away. Now both of them live in the same city as his parents (in fact, he still lives at home, since he travels a ton for his job). Sometimes she goes and spends the weekend at their house when he is home (and she goes on vacation with his family sometimes, they just room her with his sister in the hotel/etc). That seems really stiff and stuffy to not have them visit each other’s families. Why is the wedding band so important to you? Are you imagining that they are having pre-marital sex every time you go to the laundry room or you run to the grocery? Do you really want to keep their SO’s at such a distance until they marry? What if they are together for many years before they marry (or never do)? And then you might wonder afterward why your relationship with them is not close…</p>
<p>Just sharing my experience, not asking for anyone to agree with me. Different strokes for different folks. Why the personal attack?</p>
<p>Visiting is fine. Staying overnight can be done elsewhere. (I would imagine that anyone our kids consider marrying would share our values and have no problem with this policy.)
In our home, H and I make the rules for our own comfort. No one else has to agree with our rules, or know exactly why we wanted to make this rule.</p>
<p>Believe it or not, I met my in-laws at my wedding. And never visited their home until several months later.</p>
<p>I think the where-will-s/he-sleep issue becomes more of one if the couple engages in PDA or forces everyone else in the house to listen in. Discretion, discretion…</p>
<p>Atomom, to each their own. Your house, your rules. We chose to let our DS make that decision. We believe in treating them like adults and expecting them to behave like adults in return. It’s worked for us.</p>
<p>My mom doesn’t typically allow opposite sex sleepovers, either. When I lived there, boys were not allowed upstairs at all-- not even relatives. She lets us come to the vacation home with her because we live together and she knew we would get married even before we were engaged-- and she likes my fiance and considers him her son. Things were different after we bought the house together and he told my parents it was his intention to marry me. We would not have stayed at her regular house before being married unless it was the most dire emergency. She did offer to let him crash on the couch the night before the wedding so I can stay at our house without him seeing me before the wedding.</p>
<p>My mom did allow boyfriends to stay at the house with us while she and dad were at the vacation home without us for the entire summer. She didn’t want us to be alone for that long, and needed somebody to take care of the yard and the pool. But these were serious multi-year relationships when we were in our 20’s.</p>
<p>I am glad my mom made these exceptions, but I can understand why she was uncomfortable. I have a long way to go before I have to make this decision for myself, but I don’t see myself being keen on the idea either until my kids are past college aged and in very serious relationships. It’s just what I am used to.</p>
<p>ETA: I was with the same boy all four years of college. He asked me to stay at his parents once, but they only lived 20 minutes away-- his parents would let him borrow the car to come pick me up but would not let him borrow it again that same day to take me home for no particular reason. I was uncomfortable and refused to go. If he’d lived across the country I might have considered it, but I thought it was inappropriate for me to be sleeping over for no good reason. I think his mother did this on purpose to help facilitate our break up, in hindsight.</p>
<p>My middle son just visited his girlfriend’s family for a long weekend. They have been dating for about a year.He has met her family a couple of times.</p>
<p>I know that they often spend nights at each other’s apartments ( not that my son would volunteer that information). He fully expected to be put in a guest room and did not expect to share a room with her–and mentioned that he had no intention of violating her family’s expectations by creeping around in the middle of the night. Getting off on a good foot with her family --possibly his future inlaws-- was most important to him.</p>
<p>‘Also, this is the first serious boyfriend that she has had and I am wondering how to make her feel comfortable hosting him here.’ Have you asked her for some input? What about her older sibs? Can they give her some advice??</p>
<p>I think that if I would have any issues I would first discuss them with my daughter before the boyfriend arrives so we are all in the same page and we avoid awkward/ uncomfortable moments. For example: if you do not want them to be intimate in your house they should respect that but they should be warned ahead of time to avoid that last minute talk.I believe that if you guys work these details before hand, you will feel a lot more comfortable with each other during those 7 days.</p>
<p>We’ve gone thru this in the past year. DD’s BF of nearly a year stayed with us for 4-5 days over Christmas. It was a bit different because he’d been to our home several times, but not overnight. He already knew where drinks and snacks, etc. were located. </p>
<p>Sleeping arrangements went “unnoticed” as DD’s bedroom and the guest room are in the basement. H mentioned that he should sleep in guest room. My feeling is, “don’t ask.” I, of course, provided him with towels and reminded him about the security system. </p>
<p>I simply treated him as another one of the kids or other family–breakfast and lunch is their responsibility most of the time. I also made it D’s responsibility and confirmed that he had eaten. I asked if he wanted coffee or tea in the morning. I recall we did pizza one night. We usually do casual dinners in the busy days before Christmas, and I stuck with that. </p>
<p>He must feel comfortable in our home. He helps himself within reason and keeps coming back :)</p>
<p>What age are the “kids”?</p>
<p>/as an aside my former MIL is very conservative and when in laws got a vacation beach house this summer my now ex-husband (age 50!) my ex wasn’t allowed to share a room with his gf. haha.</p>
<p>Our daughter’s boyfriend has visited three times for a couple of days at a time. He is a great guy, and we are happy that our daughter has found such a nice person.</p>
<p>However, he is a picky eater, or at least, hasn’t liked some of the meals we’ve offered. For example, we took him to a Thai place we like. He tried a dish, smoke started coming out of his ears, and he spent the rest of the meal moving the food around on his plate like a kid might do, to make it seem like some food was being consumed. Last time he had a hard time with a dish with wild rice in it. He was polite about it, but he clearly didn’t consume much of these items. He was fine was all the other meals.</p>
<p>In the grand scheme of things, these are minor problems. But I think that next time he visits we’ll have my daughter provide some specific meal suggestions.</p>