Jean-Paul Sartre famously observed that “hell is other people.” Like many who quote him without reading him, I suspect he was onto something, but he never went far enough. For anyone who has raised children beyond the nursery years, the more precise and painful formulation is: “hell is other parents.” It doesn’t matter whether they are richer, poorer, more liberal, more conservative, from a different background, or exactly like you. The thing that makes the heart sink is not their gender, their class, or their race. It is their parenty-ness—that earnest, socially competitive, determined-to-have-a-good-time quality that turns otherwise ordinary adults into ambassadors of their own domestic brand. You meet them at school gates, at birthday parties, at awkward after-school playdates, on the touchline, in waiting rooms, at charity quiz nights, at ballet and drama classes. You have absolutely nothing in common with them except that your child happens to be in the same class or club as theirs. And yet you are expected to make conversation. You are expected to exchange pleasantries, feign interest, perhaps even agree to a barbecue. I don’t know how other people manage this. I am still trying to work out why we put ourselves through it. Maybe for young parents it is different. They still believe in community, in village wisdom, in finding friends among the pushchair set. But by the time you reach middle age, the illusion has evaporated. You have already met your people. You have already learned to say no. The last thing you need is another adult obligation. And so when your child’s social life drags you back into an endless round of introductions, small talk, and forced jollity, you feel something close to dread. I am not proud of this. But I am not ashamed either. Hell, as Sartre apparently agreed, is other people. He just didn’t have children.
The real problem is timing. Middle age has its own quiet Darwinism. By the time you hit your forties or fifties, you have spent decades sorting the world into people who are worth your time and people who are not. You have been let down by friends, burned by acquaintances, drained by colleagues. You have learned to value your evenings, your weekends, your silence. You have developed a finely tuned instinct for the kind of person who adds to your life rather than subtracts from it. In middle age, there is no obligation to keep anyone who fails that test. We let go of unreliable friends and needy acquaintances not because we are ruthless, but because we finally understand that time is finite and energy is precious. If it came down to it, we would rather have one honest old friend than a hundred convivial strangers. And yet parenthood, at exactly this point in life, forces us to reset the clock. Your son befriends another boy in his class, and suddenly you and your partner are expected to befriend another set of adults. You attend a school event, and the other parents gather in a small colony of false warmth, exchanging the universal currency of “So, which one is yours?” You smile, you nod, you think about the bottle of wine waiting for you at home. This is not what the older self signed up for. We already did the bit where we had to manage unreliable, needy, competitive new people. We did it in our twenties and thirties. The whole point of getting older was supposed to be fewer psychological entanglements, not more. But of course we cannot say any of this out loud. We are parents now, assumed to be on our best behavior, open to new friendships, generous with our time. So we do what middle-aged people do best: we suffer quietly and imagine what we will say to our partners when we get home.
I know other parents feel the same way about me, and honestly, I don’t take it personally. If anything, I would be suspicious if they liked me. Liking me is a sure sign of bad judgment. Other dads are at least honest. When forced at metaphorical gunpoint to talk to another father, I ask him what he does for work, where he grew up, whether he comes from a big family. I do this because there is an unspoken rule that I should attempt to be polite. He never asks me about myself. He doesn’t pretend to care. We exist like two silent chess pieces placed together by the school system, waiting for the game to move us apart. There is something almost respectful about the mutual lack of curiosity. We know exactly why we’re there. The mothers, on the other hand, are more complicated. Put a group of women together at a school gate, and a historical re-enactment begins immediately. Cliques form all over again, complete with alliances, rumors, whispers, and shifting loyalties. These are grown women with jobs and mortgages and laundry baskets, yet after one term they manage to recreate the politics of a Year 6 classroom. Then they go home and complain to their husbands that the other mothers are acting like schoolgirls—unaware, perhaps, of how funny and sad that is. It is the same with men in boardrooms, maybe, but on the touchline it is milder. Men stand in a row, stare at their phones or the game, and let the silences expand until the final whistle. The women’s behavior is far more energetic. And that is why I hate other parents most of all. Not because they are bad people. But because they stand as living proof that most of us never entirely leave school. The social world is an endlessly repeating campus: cliques, status games, subtle bullying, being left out, being included too much, being judged for a face you pulled at the wrong moment. We spend years believing we have escaped it—only to discover that our children are walking us straight back through the gates.
At school, you had no choice. You were seated next to a handful of people you liked and dozens you didn’t. There was no escape until the bell rang. As a parent, you are in the same situation, except now the bell never rings. The difference, of course, is that you are meant to be an adult about it. You are meant to be the emotional container for your child, guiding them through the social minefield without letting on that you are trigger-shy too. But the moment you arrive at the class assembly, the birthday party, the sports day, or the school fundraiser, something inside you shrinks. You look around the room and see the same social pressure cookers you thought you had left behind when you left school. There are the cool parents—usually the ones with the most relaxed clothes and the least obvious need for approval. There are the ambitious parents—the ones who already know the teacher’s first name and have read the entire curriculum. There are the anxious parents, the smug parents, the “we’re just very busy” parents, the ones who talk too loudly, and the ones who sabotage with silence. You stand against the wall, holding a paper plate of cake, wondering how your life ended up here. It would be easy to say that we should all grow up. But maybe this is what happens to all of us when we enter an unstructured group: some ancient brain mechanism switches on, scanning for threats and allies, checking our place in the hierarchy. The fact that it looks silly is precisely why it is uncomfortable. You watch a woman laugh a little too hard at a man’s joke and know with a dread certainty that this man is now a minor prince in the playground. Your stomach clenches. You remember being twelve. You decide you need another cup of coffee just to survive.
Perhaps all this explains why I have developed what my wife calls a bad attitude. I accept the description. I answer the questions at quiz nights; I seem to irritate people just by existing; I am apparently not as charming as I imagine. The most vivid proof came at a fundraiser for my daughter’s middle school. I was on a team of parents, and I did what I always do in a quiz: I answered the questions. By the end, our team had won the prize, a bottle of wine so underwhelming that I still wonder if the real prize was hidden somewhere else. I was pleased. I did not gloat, or at least I did not think I was gloating. Yet one of the mothers on our team decided, afterwards, that the right thing to do was to tell my wife, to her face, that she did not like me. There was no context. No attempt at conversation. She simply delivered the message, as if reporting a work complaint. My wife, who has far more social grace than I do, was embarrassed and confused. I was strangely impressed. Not because I enjoyed being disliked—although I don’t mind, because as a rule I only respect people who dislike me. But because the incident was so perfectly, unavoidably unnecessary. I did not care about this woman. I did not care what she thought. I had no desire to become her friend. And yet she had managed to drag me into a psychodrama anyway. This is what I mean by hell. It is not that parents are worse than other people. It is that they are forced into a relationship with you despite having no real basis for the relationship except the random fact that your children belong to the same institution. At school you had to sit next to people you hated; as a parent you have to mind them. And when you try to move away, they speak to your wife. It is, as Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone might say, exactly the kind of moment where you think you are out, and then they pull you back in. For a moment, you feel as trapped as you were on the first day of term. You cannot choose your child’s classmates. You cannot choose the other parents. All you can choose is how much you let it bother you. That, it turns out, is the whole battle.
It would be dishonest to end on bitterness, though. Time has a way of softening even the hardest misanthrope, or maybe it is just a matter of lighting upon the right group. In recent years, my youngest daughter has taken up rugby, and the parents I meet there are different. They are loud, laid-back, mud-covered, largely unconcerned with status, and they treat outsiders with the easy welcome of people who are too exhausted to maintain a clique. We stand on the touchline in the cold, shouting encouragement, laughing at the chaos, and nobody asks me what I do or who I am. They simply hand over a flask of coffee and complain about the weather. It is a small, lovely miracle. I do not want to pretend that one good group of parents cancels out the rest. Hell is still other parents most of the time. But even Hell has its suburbs, its quiet neighborhoods where the people are decent and the small talk is optional. It proves only that if you play the machine enough times, eventually you hit the jackpot. Or maybe it proves something else: that I have mellowed, or that the problem was never really other people, but the strange, unnatural circumstances of parenthood, which can make anyone feel like an outsider. Perhaps the other parents I hated were also lonely, also anxious, also waiting for someone to say something real. Perhaps the woman who told my wife she did not like me was only defending herself against a room that felt too familiar. I don’t know. But I have finally found a place where I no longer feel the need to hide behind a paper plate. My daughter plays rugby, I carry the oranges, and I am almost happy. Maybe I can be saved after all. At the very least, I can stand in the rain with other parents and feel, for a few moments, not entirely in hell. That is enough for a middle-aged misanthrope. And, if we are honest, it is more than enough for many.
