I miss dinner parties.

Not the Pinterest dinner parties.

Not the perfectly curated tablescape with twelve matching wine glasses and an appetizer that requires a microplane, three reductions and a culinary degree.

I mean the old kind.

People came over.

We ate.

We drank.

We talked.

Sometimes we sat on the floor because there weren’t enough chairs.

Someone inevitably told a story that should never have been repeated.

Someone laughed too loudly.

Someone stayed too long.

And somehow, that was the point.

I recently read an Atlantic piece about what it calls “the great disinvitation”. Which is the decline of adults visiting one another in their homes. The numbers are startling: Americans who say they host friends or family at home at least monthly reportedly fell from 42 percent in 1975 to just 12 percent in 2026.

That’s not a decline.

That’s practically a missing-persons report.

And I understand it.

We are busy.

We work.

We have kids, aging parents, errands, exhaustion, laundry that reproduces overnight and approximately 4,000 passwords to remember.

Friendship has become something we schedule three weeks in advance between dentist appointments.

And then there are our screens.

Why invite six people over when we can lie horizontally and watch Slow Horses while eating dumplings in a nightshirt?

Honestly?

There is something profoundly sacred about my house when nobody else is in it.

I can lounge.

I can eat whatever the hell I want.

I can watch House without explaining why I’m emotionally invested in a fictional doctor’s differential diagnosis.

I can be gloriously unpresentable.

There is no hostessing.

No cleaning.

No “Does everyone have enough?”

No realizing at 11:47 p.m. that someone is still sitting on your couch and you have officially run out of social battery.

And yet…

I miss the noise.

I miss people sprawled everywhere.

I miss conversations that wandered from politics to childhood to sex to someone’s bizarre cousin in New Jersey.

I miss laughing until my stomach hurt.

I miss the intimacy of being physically together without an agenda.

Maybe that’s what we’ve lost.

Not merely dinner parties.

Unstructured togetherness.

The kind where nobody is multitasking, nobody is performing productivity and nobody is wondering whether they should have just sent a text.

So perhaps the answer isn’t choosing between solitude and society.

Maybe we need both.

I want the sacred sanctuary of my nightshirt and the occasional evening when the house is full of people sitting on the floor, eating too much, laughing too loudly and overstaying their welcome.

Because apparently adulthood has become a strange paradox.

We desperately need other people.

And we are increasingly reluctant to let them into our homes.

So here’s my radical proposal.

Come over.

I’ll feed you.

We’ll sit wherever we can find a place.

We’ll laugh.

We’ll talk about absolutely nothing important.

And then, at approximately 9:30, I will lovingly escort you toward the door.

Because I am reclaiming the dinner party.

But I am also reclaiming my nightshirt.

Boundaries, people. Even friendship needs a curfew.