Dinner Parties

15 May, 2026

When I was younger, my mom used to go to a lot of dinner parties. Someone different hosted it every month, but the months she hosted it, she went all out. I had mixed feelings on these parties; I hated being woken up "early" trying to rest up after my crack-of-dawn Team Fortress 2 binge, hated being interrupted from playing more TF2 to be paraded downstairs and interrogated about school, asked if I knew kids who went to entirely different school systems, etc. But the food, man. Tupperwares packed with deviled eggs, fancy cheeses, overflowing trays of pasta. I was in a fatass paradise once the guests cleared away.

Eventually, the dinner parties just...stopped. I didn't really question it at the time, parents and their friends can be such oddly abstract entities at the time. I didn't know why until years later. Didn't understand until I started running RPGs¹.

I didn't realize that up until the cessation of the dinner parties, their frequency was increasing. Once every 6 months became 4 months, 2 months, eventually monthly. For whatever reason, be it due to finances, lack of available time, lack of culinary knowledge, nobody could host a dinner party quite like my mom could. And so they didn't. So while my mom was busting her ass playing single-player Overcooked!, optimizing the oven like a Balatro deck, and cleaning every single item in the house like that lil' shrimp guy from Finding Nemo they got to sleep in, show up, eat the food, drink the wine, and head back to a perfectly clean home.

One day my mom decides to stop running these parties, just to see what happens. This just isn't sustainable, and surely someone else is going to step up to preserve the sacred tradition of the dinner party, right? Why am I asking when I already told you the answer two paragraphs ago?

I find that even the best of us have a terrible capacity for taking favors for granted. I know this because I'm a professional at it, too. If you feel like your dinner party generosity is being exploited, remember that you enjoy hosting dinner parties. That's why you did it in the first place, and your pals know that you enjoy hosting; hell, they probably think they're doing you a favor! Once you've grounded yourself and are no longer preparing some form of ritual or hex against their bloodlines, here a few options to preserve the spirit of the dinner party²:

Go to a restaurant

To me, this is a very different activity to a dinner party. I love a restaurant trip, but it doesn't scratch the dinner party hosting or attending itch! But it could be a good solution for you, especially if everyone has the means to go out to a restaurant so consistently. This is the solution my mom and her friends ended up doing, and they seemed perfectly happy doing something else entirely together.

Order a pizza

Alright, say you still want the dinner party experience. You don't want a crowded, noisy restaurant, you want to crash on your best friend's sofa and pet their dog! Just reduce the overhead. If you can make yourself happy putting in less effort, your friends may feel more comfortable stepping up to host.

Host potlucks

Okay, you don't like pizza either. It makes sense, homemade food just hits different. Try to blur the line between hosts a little. Show that everyone can host; sure it's a lot of legwork when you do it all by yourself, but it's not hard.

All of these solutions beget their own problems, and at the end of the day sometimes you really do just want to have a good old fashioned dinner party, under the sole provision of a generous host. But even if that's still your end goal, there's something to be accomplished in each of these little "solutions". Just pace yourself, hold your boundaries strong, and remember that just because "host" is a noun that describes you very often, it doesn't have to be an immutable piece of your identity.

And whatever you do, don't go on r/dinnerparties and whine about being stuck as a "Forever Host".