Until 1975, half of Americans said they had people over at home every month. By 1998 the share who gave or attended a monthly dinner party had dropped by half, and the share who never entertained at home had tripled. The article setting this out leans on the survey data (the DDB Needham Life Style series) and points out that the drop in hosting was much bigger than the drop in church attendance, which is the decline everyone actually writes columns about.

What snagged me is the end date. The data stops in 1998. No smartphone, no feed, no streaming queue. Every explanation I’d have reached for by reflex is either absent or barely born, which is a useful thing for a reflex to run into.

I keep thinking about the novels the piece opens with. Couples, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Revolutionary Road: the drama happens in living rooms because living rooms were where the adults were. A writer today who wants forty minutes of cornered, drunk, escalating conversation has to invent a reason for anyone to be in the same room, and I’d guess the plot gets a wedding or a funeral to do the work a Tuesday dinner used to.

My hunch is that hosting behaves like a skill and a norm at once, so it decays in a loop. Fewer people host, fewer people know how, and a guest who has never hosted feels the invitation as a debt they can’t repay. The bar for “just come over” keeps rising until only a real occasion clears it.

Did anyone decide this, or did we each just skip one dinner?

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