Stop. Just Stop.
This may be the Slate-iest article of all time. I’m trying to decide if it’s just idiotic or if it’s actually an indicia of sociopathy. I realize that in some circles, saying goodbye can be up to an hour of potentially tedious conversations, but that’s just a reason to perhaps limit your goodbyes to the people you actually care about, or at minimum to just politely excuse yourself from any goodbye conversation taking longer than a few seconds. If you really need to get out of there quickly, at the very least common decency dictates that you let someone know you’re leaving.
Just walking away is considered rude for good reason- people who really care about you actually do wonder where you went when you suddenly disappear. If you consistently find that no one misses you when you don’t say goodbye, more likely it says something about the quality of your relationships than it says about the worth of a goodbye.
My wife’s mom’s side of the family take hours to say goodbye. “Krilly Goodbyes”, I call them. First you say goodbye in the house, then you walk outside and say goodbye in the driveway, then someone inevitably gets in your car with you to make sure its good to go, then you get in the car, start it up, and say goodbye from the window, then they follow you out to the end of the driveway. It drives me nuts. And I’m trying to fight it, so I understand the desire to avoid awkward and/or lengthy goodbyes, but not saying goodbye is just douchey.
Last Sunday, we went to a post-wedding brunch for a wedding I was in, and in which I knew both bride and groom, their family, as well as some of their extended family and other guests’ family. We had to hit the road to get Zazzy back to Mayonnaise, but we still made a point to hit the major players for goodbyes and at least one person in each circle so if anyone said, “Hey, where’d Kazzy go?” someone could chime in.
If you don’t want to say goodbye, don’t even go to the party.Report
I have exactly the same issue (I even call it the Wife’s Maiden Name Goodbye) made more awkward by the fact that the goodbyes are usually preceded by hours of silent television watching. But not doing it would just be, as you say, douchey.Report
HA! Bonded as one, we three. The Better Half’s mother’s side of the family (also known as the Their Surname Goodbye, and a good-humored family joke) takes FOREVER. I am always the one to give increasingly urgent signs that we need to LEAVE ALREADY! It drives me bananas.
But leaving without saying goodbye to, at least, the host and/or guest of honor is incredibly douchey, as is the article linked. Slate at its Slateyest, indeed.Report
Make it four. The wife CANNOT leave a social event without saying goodbye to everyone, which involves communicating with them, which leads to extended conversation, which leads to me wondering how long it will take us to actually leave.
I started a new system with her: I’d tell her that I’d begin telling her It Is Time To Leave about an hour before I actually wanted to go on the premise that that would give here ample time to say appropriate goodbyes to everyone. All that did was make the goodbyes an hour longer.Report
Ha, brothers four are we! I should make clear that “Krilly” is a pseudonym for Zazzy’s mother’s maiden name, the side of the family we struggle with, so we’ve even aligned our nomenclature. Huzzah!
And much like Mark, the goodbyes are often preceded by silent awkwardness, which makes the intensity of the goodbyes all the worse.Report
Okay, you three need to take a tip from decades of the best business meeting advice and program your phone (which replaced pagers) to beep you with an emergency call a set period after you activate it. Then you pretend that you’re needed to perform emergency open heart surgery on an alien who crash landed in Roswell or something, and you hop in your car and speed away. Your friends and relations can then spend the slotted two-hour goodbye time telling each other how important you are to Star Fleet, MIB, or project blue book.Report
{ring!} “Hello, Mr. President. What can I do … Yes, of course, sir! I’m on my way!” {hangs up} “Sorry, everybody, that was the, um, dog-sitter. I need to, um, go meet her at the vet’s. See you guys later. If there’s a later. I mean, um, bye.”Report
Bonus points if you actually get King Kong to carry you off.Report
Hell, don’t say “Hello”. Just show up, mingle, if someone asks who you are then say stuff like “Oh, I know Knucklehead from work!”, get some food, get some booze, and leave.Report
Awesome.Report
Obligatory:
http://youtu.be/AISLBrQ-ODE
I dunno, it doesn’t strike me as that big a deal. I had a couple friends who were sort of famous for this – one of them would often also just show up without greeting, through an unlocked door or window if necessary. That PROBably wouldn’t fly now, though I dunno, if he still lived in my neighborhood I guess it would depend on how far he took it.
The other was so famous for just bailing from social gatherings unnoticed that we named the the phenomenon after him: leaving incognito was known as “bolting, Colby-style”.Report
I guess it should also be noted that we would also (and I was an avid practitioner of this one) always try to leave the person on the other end of phonecalls hanging without a goodbye.
So when the conversation would seem to be winding down, you would launch into some shaggy-dog story, or what seemed like the beginning of a question, then disconnect the call mid-sentence.
Whoever did this first was the winner.
Recently, with no prompting whatsoever, my four-year-old boy has started pulling this prank when he talks to a certain person on the phone. I have no idea how or where he learned it, but he thinks it’s HILARIOUS (we have to stop him from calling the person back to do it again).
I’m so proud, yet a little disturbed that he figured out by four what took us until high school to learn.Report
Also also (I swear this is the last one) for a while we would do sort of a reverse version of these in real-life. So you would say your goodbyes, and then wait for the person to reach or better yet pass the doorframe, then excitedly call out to them, like there was one last thing you had forgotten to tell them.
When they stop, and come back into the doorframe, you just wave and say “goodbye” again.
It’s really, supremely irritating.
What I am saying is, “goodbyes” are a fun social convention to mess with.Report
Do you even have any friends anymore?Report
[sad trombone]Report
Hello’s are even more fun to prank (though they generally take more work.)
A friend of a friend is fond of surprising reporters waiting for his plane to land… by walking up behind them and saying hi (naturally before the plane has landed).Report
A lot of this is context-dependent. There are certain social events that call for saying your goodbyes to the host and/or specific guests, however, more relaxed events with people you see all the time, I can’t imagine it’s that big a deal (though, there are safety concerns – if you’re with people at a bar, maybe tell someone you’re leaving so that they don’t think you’ve been abducted – and texting after you leave isn’t good enough, because people might not get the text).
Like others, my wife’s family is really bad at goodbyes. When it’s time to go, someone tends to suddenly have something important or noteworthy to talk about that, for some reason, they didn’t bring up in the previous 5 hours. So, at some events, we will just leave without saying goodbye to everyone. (Thankfully, the kids are a good excuse. ‘Oh the kids are tired, we have to leave RIGHT NOW.’ That usually works.)Report
I think this may have a lot to do with two things.
First, introversion. Introverts prefer to slip out the back, Jack. The long goodbyes can be painful.
Second is alcohol consumption. If folks have been at it, just slipping out makes sense; if they’re pretty sober, saying goodbye is good manners.Report
Not to mention, as the article pointed out, culture. Some cultures it’s perfectly normal to ghost. The writer is just saying that they prefer that culture’s norms over the say goodbye for 30 minutes norm.Report
I think at least a cursory “Hey, I’m off” to the host is more important when alcohol is involved, gives them a chance to evaluate whether you’ve had so much to drink that you’re not in any shape to head home and lets them know that they won’t find you dozing on the back porch at 4amReport
Not a problem for me, I can’t drink (migraine trigger).Report
I’d also say that drinking engagements can often lead to pressure to say. “Just one more drink!”Report
If someone pulled this at a my party and I found out about it, I’d consider it a major insult.Report
Really? A “major insult”?
Man, I can see all the way up to “faux-pas”, but that seems extreme.
If I wanted to observe such strict formalities on pain of “major insult”, I’d be at “work”, not a “party” with my “friends”.
This is why Larry David is the poet and revolutionary of our times.Report
Hello, I must be going.
I cannot stay,
I came to say
I must be going.
I’m glad I came
but just the same
I must be going.
I’ll stay a week or two,
I’ll stay the summer through,
but I am telling you,
I must be going.Report
I find it useful to simply co-opt “goodbye language” from 80s-era movie break up scenes. So if you’re about to leave a cocktail party, for example, you just find the host or hostess and say:
“I’m sorry, but I’m leaving you. It’s for the best. We never talk anymore, and I need something more. It’s not you, it’s me. I really wish you well. I’ll always treasure our times together. Goodbye.”Report
Note that this is likely to be the cause of some misunderstanding when employed at your girlfriend’s birthday party.
Nothing that can’t be solved with a boombox, though.Report
My favorite “that’s how this person said goodbye” story was a couple where the woman was the “let’s go already” part of the pair. Her method was to tap her watch and say, “(Name Redacted)? Time for love.”Report