Dear Eric: My wife and I own a guest house up the street from our home. When we’re not using it for ourselves, my wife rents it out on Airbnb. The Airbnb guests pay a nightly rate and also pay a cleaning fee, which we use to pay the cleaning staff after they check out.
I like to let friends from out of town stay there for free when they are visiting. My wife is OK with not charging them a nightly rate but thinks we should charge them the cleaning fee because we still have to pay to have the unit cleaned after they leave.
I disagree. I don’t like taking money from friends at all. We’re financially successful, so we don’t need the money. Being generous to my friends and family is part of my personality. It feels wrong to me to ask friends to pay a cleaning fee.
My wife and I rarely argue, but we can’t seem to agree on this. What do you think?
– Generous Husband
Dear Husband: Neither of you is wrong, per se. Your wife doesn’t want to end up paying for the privilege of hosting, which is fair. And you want to extend hospitality to your friends without strings. In this case, the solution may not be coming to an agreement. Instead, the best course of action is to find a compromise that doesn’t cause resentment for either of you.
If you don’t want to ask your friends to pay, then see if there’s another way that the cleaning fee can be covered. Perhaps visiting friends can take you out to dinner that costs the same amount. Or, if you and your wife have discretionary pots of money within your shared accounts, maybe you can volunteer to cover the cost of the cleaning.
If hospitality is paramount for you, be creative about finding a way to do it. And make that the focus of your conversations with your wife. Instead of both of you standing on your separate sides, ask each other what’s in the middle. With disagreements like this, sometimes it’s useful to say “we just see this differently and that’s fine. How can we work together to make sure everyone gets what they want?”
Dear Eric: On December 6, “Leftovers, Anyone” wrote about her daughter’s Friendsgiving overshadowing her own Thanksgiving. The letter read, in part, “I don’t feel it is as special as it was because now everyone has already had the traditional Thanksgiving meal that previously we only had that one time a year.” I think that I can give another way to look at this, or at least share my experience.
My stepdaughter and her daughters were so tired of all the Friendsgiving parties that they attended that they didn’t show up to our traditional Thanksgiving meal. They showed up hours later and literally ate leftovers.
Clearly my party and my side of the family was not a priority. Even the hospitality of sending food home with them was taken away from me, as their refrigerator and freezer was stuffed from their prior parties. I’m not sure that this is what children need to be taught, but I also think that it is the future of Thanksgiving.
– Change is Coming
Dear Change: I’d gently suggest that you’re not helpless against the changing tide. You’ve noticed a pattern that seems to be in conflict with your hopes and expectations for the holiday. So, for next year, you have the opportunity to talk about it with your daughters in advance and find a solution that makes everyone happy.
Every holiday meal is, of course, about the food, but its primary purpose is togetherness as a family. As people change, and family structures change, we have the power to change what that togetherness looks like and how it happens.
It’s important for you to sit at a table with your daughters and share a meal. From your letter, it’s also important to extend hospitality to them in the form of leftovers. Now that the dust of the holidays has settled, talk to them about what’s important to you and what’s important to them. And see if together you can come up with a plan for next year that meets everyone’s needs. It might mean that Thanksgiving changes a little bit on your side – maybe there’s fewer leftovers, for instance – but it also might mean that they’re more aware of the impact of their actions and they plan their time better.
Holidays don’t just happen. I know you know this because you’re putting a lot of work into it. It’s good to talk to your loved ones about what you’re doing and to include them in the work of making the holidays special for everyone, you included.
(Send questions to R. Eric Thomas at eric@askingeric.com or P.O. Box 22474, Philadelphia, PA 19110. Follow him on Instagram and sign up for his weekly newsletter at rericthomas.com.)