Once again I am wondering if it has always been this way through history, or if it is just a modern phenomenon. Do people not know how to make social plans anymore, or is it just that they don’t want to?
To be fair, I do score pretty freakin’ high on the extrovert scale. That means I turn into a sad dried up bread roll without my fix of other humans. I totally get that introverts find me horrifying. I talk too much, I work a room, I get tipsy and tell you I love your hair. I am that person. My friends come in all stripes and because I am north of 50, these friends have been vetted and have made the cut. Surely they want to hang out.
In fact I know they want to hang out because they show up every time I invite them to anything. With food and wine usually. When booking theater tickets, they flood me with messages, happy to come. Summer yard party for fifty people, the best ones are all in. Christmas dinner, Easter fun, random Saturday get together? All at our house, and they show up.
Not only do I seem to backfill everybody’s plans, my kids have until very recently been seemingly unable to manage their own social calendars. Recently, they have been branching out a little more themselves. However, when I was still doing the playdate thing, it was always me initiating it. The conversation would go something like this:
Me: “Which friend do you want to see?
Kid: “I don’t know.
Me: “How about so and so?” (confession, I always pick the kid with a Mom that would actually respond to the invitation within 36 hours.)
Kid: “Oh! Can you invite this particular kid who has a mom who never answers your messages? Ya Mom, how about that kid?”
Me: Stab myself in the eye with a grapefruit spoon
Then there is the other apparent societal change that was news to me. Do you remember when there was that one kid in the neighbourhood who had a pool? Back in the day you could tell which house it was because an army of skinny kids with towels would show up in the morning, and there was a pile of bikes in the front yard.
We have a pool. Nobody comes over.
Invitations to come and swim go unanswered even on the hottest days. After the first summer we moved to a house with a pool I ended up throwing away a freezer load of hot dogs and Popsicles. Five years later it is still a sort of an annual sad back-to-school ceremony of tossing away my freezer-burned hopes and dreams.
Don’t get me started on the uncouth who can’t organize themselves out of a lettuce wrap to answer a party invite. Or worse, would show up with their kid, a sibling with no RSVP. Who does that?! I am just grateful we are now in the years when I no longer have to invite the whole class. Small mercies.
So what is it? Kitchen parties don’t happen anymore. People don’t make plans Friday nights, we are so so tired. Our parents rolled up the carpets and danced into the wee hours drinking cosmopolitans and smoking. We are so lame.
Another tradition that is apparently out of fashion is just feeding whoever is still visiting when it is dinner time. Everybody gets their panties in a knot about not imposing. Just throw some extra pasta in the pot and don’t be a jerk about it.
The exception is an item on my list which I support being relegated to the underworld of society. Spontaneous visits. I am happy that those are in the culture dumpster. I like to have the occasional bra-less day, and I don’t want a bunch of my husband’s buddies showing up to watch me leap off the couch and swing the melons into the bedroom at high speed. Nobody needs to see that.
As for being the inviter, I am starting to accept that this is my fate. I realize that no matter why, not one damned person I know is as prolific an inviter as I am, I love them anyway. I continue to invite them and plan social stuff because society needs us to connect, I need it, and my friends value it (I hope).
Post script: My daughter sat down on the couch next to me last night and was excited that a friend had invited her out for a spontaneous coffee. I said “you seem happy to see him.” She crumpled up her face and answered “I am excited because for once I didn’t have to do the inviting.”
Awe honey, I know your pain.