Why We Don't Party

“Just because we get married and have kids, it doesn’t mean that we’re going to stop going out.”

That’s what people say to themselves before they have kids. They pledge to themselves that they are going to get babysitters and still go out and have some drinks with their friends once a week, or every other week. They pledge that they are going to keep some semblance of their pre-child social life going. What they don’t realize is that married couples don’t stop going out because they’ve become lame. OK, that’s certainly part of it, but it’s not the only reason people like me stop going out so much.

These are the reasons married couples don’t go out:

(1) $9 beers. If you knew that going to bars would cost you $9 a beer, would you keep going out? Trust me on this one: you don’t want to know what babysitters get paid these days (and most of it is your wife overpaying them to make sure they come back).

Here’s how the math works. The babysitter comes over and you enter the 30 minute transition period where, because your wife needs to show the babysitter where every single thing is in the house is. (just to clarify, don’t get to leave, but you’re still overpaying the babysitter for this time). So the babysitter gets there at 8 p.m. You leave at 8:30 p.m., meet your friends at 8:45 p.m. You’re out for 3 hours and home at midnight. That’s 4 hours of time for the babysitter at, maybe, $9 an hour, for $36. If you and the wife each have 4 drinks during those 3 hours, that’s 8 drinks. Assuming $4 a drink, that’s $32 at the bar, lets round up to $35. But you didn’t really pay $35. You paid double, because you also gave the babysitter $35. So you paid a total of $70 for 8 drinks, or about $9 a drink.

The big problem with this is this: what if some uninteresting topic of conversation comes up while you’re out? In your pre-child life, who would care? At $9 a drink, you care. Every moment has to be interesting and exciting, because it’s costing you! And so having to sit and listen to your wife discuss the wallpaper designs she’s considering for the downstairs bathroom will make you cry.

(2) Getting a Ride Home. What if you really need to blow off steam and you drink a bit too much? You hopefully aren’t gonna drive home. In the old days, you might walk home or hitch a ride with someone less inebriated and then come back to get your car the next morning. But how does that work now? Now, when you wake up the next morning, your spouse can’t just drive you back to your car, because you’d be leaving the kids home alone. You have to go back to get the car as a family. And there’s nothing more edifying than getting to show your kids where daddy got his drink on the night before. That will certainly fill you with pride.

And what if you took the primary family car out that night? The one with all of the car seats? Then, when you drive from home to bar the next morning, you’ll be forced to let the kids ride 70’s-style sans carseats, kids all piled up in the backseat while you go get your car from the bar (now you’re really a good father).

The alternative is even sadder: you have to remember, when leaving the bar, to go back to your car only to get the carseats out, and then hitch a ride home with a friend, while carrying all of the car seats with you in their car. It’s tough to maintain the illusion that you’re a cool couple out for a hip night on the town if you’ve got an armload of empty carseats with you. It doesn’t exactly scream “party.”

(3) OK, You’re Home, Now What. You wanted to avoid the $9 beers, so you figured the best way to do that was to hire a younger babysitter so you could pay her less. This was an ingenious strategy until you got home and realized younger babysitters can’t drive, and now you have to drive her home. So if you get hammered, you and your armload of empty car seats will be sitting up front in the passenger seat in your buddy's car, with the babysitter in back, while your soon-to-be-ex-buddy drives your babysitter home with you.

And even if you were OK to drive yourself home, there’s a moral difference between being willing to drive yourself home after 2-4 drinks (but still within the legal limit) and feeling OK about driving a young babysitter home after those same 2-4 drinks. So now you’re drinking about two beers when you go out to make sure you don’t push it. I don’t think this is what the pre-child version of you had in mind.

A similar potential problem arises with younger babysitters in that they’ll ask you when you’re going to be home. One time my wife and I hadn’t been out for months and got an 8th grade babysitter that lived a few houses down from us. The wife and I planned to hit a bar and grill a mile from our house for dinner and drinks with friends. We were excited because we knew we didn’t have to drive her home and told her we’d be home “around midnight.” She informed us that she “had to be home by 10:15.” Wow, a night out that ends at 10 p.m. The pre-child version of you would not consider this “going out.”

(4) Wake Up Call. They say that one effect of alcohol on the central nervous system is that your body essentially doesn’t get much benefit from sleep until much of the alcohol is out of your system. This means that if you’ve been out drinking and get home at 1 a.m., the sleep you get for the first few hours – say, from 1 a.m. to 4 a.m. -- is pretty much worthless. So even if you manage to get a cheap babysitter that drives herself, and even if you go out to a bar within walking distance and can get yourself home, you still are gonna be screwed when your kids wake you up at 7 a.m. or so. And God forbid one of them has a nightmare.

I’ve considered trying various things to try to figure this out.

I've tried having the babysitter to keep the kids up extra-late (until 11 p.m. or so) in an effort to get them to sleep in! Although this seems like it should work, it invariably fails for at least one kid. And the kids are whiney and cranky the next morning, which is excellent for keeping your hangover going.

I’ve considering buying happy meals in the McDonalds drive thru at 1 a.m. and “getting breakfast ready early” by leaving it on the table at 1:30 a.m. so that it’s there for them when they get up 6 hours later and hopefully will just eat and leave me alone.

I’ve even considered sneaking into the baby’s room and moving her from crib to floor in the middle of the night so she won’t wake me to get out in the morning.

And I’ve actually tried sleeping in an undisclosed location so I couldn’t be found, which unfortunately only causes your kids, with a handful of cold fries, to wander outside in their pajamas looking for you, which never improves your standing in the neighborhood.

(5) Breastfeeding. Drinking is a doubly-dirty business if your wife is still breastfeeding. She has to pump in advance, save up the milk, and then has to undertake the dirty business of the pump and dump the next morning, where the alcohol-tainted breast milk is expressed and tossed. There’s just something much more tawdry and depressing about drinking alcohol when it causes you to dump breastmilk down the drain. The health effects seem much more real to you.

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So there’s five big reasons why we – those that are married with younger children – don’t “party” any more. And those that are child-free with schemes for how they are going to go out once they have kids, well, maybe you guys ought to go out extra for the next few months and get it out of your system.