One of the few things my mother and I are in total agreement about in every way is that, in this scurvy and disasterous world of ours, nothing is in such a sad state as party RSVP manners. And of party RSVP manners, none have fallen so very low—-yea down into the very earth!—-as dinner party RSVPs.
Whether it is the failure of parties in general, or the failure of modern dinners, or the horrible confluence of the two that is to blame is beyond the purview of my rational organ. I wish all dinner party guests at the devil.
A dinner party of any kind is fundamentally an offering of resources. I have these vegetables from my CSA, for example. I have the time and knowledge to prepare these vegetables in an elegant and amusing fashion. I have this table, and tablecloth, and plates, and silverware, and glasses. When I invite my friends, I have done a close calculation on my meager resources to discover if I can offer them without ruining myself. At other times in my life, there has been no tablecloth. But the food has always been good.
I have a painful memory of 2003, practically a lifetime away in so many ways, during the period of my greatest poverty. I had moved to New York without a dime or a job, and my first employment was so unsuccessful I may have personally driven a non-profit into bankruptcy. I didn’t receive wages for two months. If I ate at all, it was somewhat scavenged. I had one friend in the city, a singer I’d known since I was 18. I invited him to join me in my little dinner, having scrounged together a few dollars for pasta and vegetables, to celebrate a new low-wage job I’d gotten. It was all I had to eat for the week, this big pot of pasta, and when it was gone, I would be out of food until my first paycheck. My friend came over and, seeing me take a half a bowl, grabbed the pot and ate it until it was gone. He scraped it with a spoon to make sure nothing remained. What could I do? He was my only friend. After he left, I cried.
Now, my dinner party problems are the opposite. People ask if they can please come to my house for dinner, so I invite them. I spend a whole day, sometimes more, getting ready. I clean the house, set the table, time everything to go into the oven or onto the stove on a precise schedule. I’ve gotten quite good at thinking of courses as a sort of narrative—what flavors will be wanted exactly after this? what do these particular guests desire?—and by evening, everything is exactly in its place, ready to happen. All afternoon, the party was growing. Phone calls all day: Do you mind if I bring my ex-husband? or I heard you were making dinner for So-and-so, and I got jealous! Fine. I’m making all kinds of calculations about how much food there is, how many chairs there are, whether someone will be drinking wine from a highball glass. But fine, I say. I recalculate my resources to decide if I have enough, and I just barely do. I recalibrate my expectations of what I can offer.
Inevitably, five minutes before the party starts, someone is feeling sick and won’t come. The friend shows without the ex-husband, who is shy about new people. The one who invited herself calls—she is too ashamed that she invited herself to come, so she’s just going to drop by for a drink, no food. Half an hour after the party was supposed to start, and dinner getting cold on the stove as we wait, a couple calls to say they haven’t decided what they’re in the mood to have for dinner, so they’ll call in an hour and let me know if they feel like coming. (They went with steak on the grill at home, and it was really delicious, they assure me.)
At times, this results in me sitting with a single friend, dining amid five or six place settings, the table crowded with the specters of people who couldn’t be bothered to walk five minutes to my house. The wise would say that I should either stop caring or stop giving dinners. I should be casual. Casual! Why make everything before guests arrive? Isn’t it more fun to cook and talk with your guests? Then you know for whom you’re really cooking anyway. Bless you who can do that. My mom and I suffer from a similar inability to multitask; cooking with guests already there and chatting with me sounds like cooking while juggling plates on a tightrope. I will definitely hurt myself. And give up making dinner? Are you kidding?
…a couple calls to say they haven’t decided what they’re in the mood to have for dinner, so they’ll call in an hour and let me know if they feel like coming. (They went with steak on the grill at home, and it was really delicious, they assure me.)
This part gave me hives.
RSVP manners are definitely poor in general, but it seems to me they kind of always have been. I remember throwing a party for my soccer team a long time ago, and thanks in part to my somewhat scattershot and late method of inviting people, I ended up expecting a dozen people, but only one showed up. I had a conversation with a wise friend after that – a friend whose dinner parties were (and still are) invariably well attended and lively – and she said this: “Until they get to your house, the guests are the enemy. You have to outflank and outwit them. You have to pull out all your weapons to get them there.” Once the strong-arming was done, everyone always had a fantastic time.
Their behavior is appalling. I wonder: how do you communicate this and still keep them as friends?
One of my colleagues entertains CONSTANTLY. Seriously, there is no way to keep up with all the invitations. Plus, she has a super-tiny space and is always trying to throw huge dinner parties. I feel like a heel for declining three of every four invitations, but it’s sure better than saying nothing.
As a host, I always try to make it clear what type of gathering it is. Casual drop-by or sit-down at-eight-PM-exactly? It always helps if the main course is not something super time-sensitive, though. It’s tough to welcome everyone AND staff the kitchen singlehandedly.
Reminds me of a line from an old episode of Taxi: “Damn GUESTS!”
People who invite themselves to a dinner party when they find out about it, then don’t actually come once they have been accommodated? There has to be a special circle of hell for them. Seriously.
I don’t mean to be a jerk, but I can’t believe how rude your friends are!! (Readers of this post excluded, I hope!) I read this first thing this morning and that steak on the grill thing made me so sick I couldn’t even respond.
I feel your pain on a very personal level and am amazed you don’t seem more seething mad about the steaks-on-their-own-damn-grill people. That is the rudest thing I’ve heard in a long time. As you sound like an excellent host, I hope they’ll never again be invited to one of your gatherings. And I hope they wonder why they’ve been left off future guest lists, though I doubt they’ll ever figure out that what they did was so unforgivable.
I have several unconfirmed invitations for Thanksgiving and am wondering why seemingly intelligent people can’t understand the difference between cooking for six and for ten, or the fact that careful planners plan how not to have to make trips to the crowded, under-supplied stores the day before the holiday. Are they waiting for a better offer, or do they simply have their heads up their turkeys???? Unacceptable.
4: I thought that too. AWB, are you still even friends with that steak-grilling couple? (On the other hand, I can see how your singer friend might have thought he was paying you a compliment by devouring the entire pot of pasta.)
5: KS, you have identified the bane of the party-thrower’s existence, IMO: The person who puts off RSVPing in order to weigh all of his/her possible other options before finally deciding at the last moment which thing to do. I had a friend once who did this obsessively; I loved seeing her, but after a while I got sick of waiting to find out if the evening I had planned was ultimately to be judged as having insufficiently promising entertainment value.
The steak-grilling people have ceased to exist for me, which is sad because I thought we might be good friends when I first moved here and met them. But I really can’t see past it. One of them has texted me recently (about a month or so after the dinner party) with an insistent: “You are going to text me back and we are having coffee today!” message. But it’s not like she perceived that they had done anything wrong, or, as far as I know, even been able to discern that maybe I actually feel a little cool toward them. Why would anyone care that much about who shows up for dinner?
Might it be worth it to express your pique to them? I say this in part because I have, in the past, done things that I now recognize as having been egregiously rude. At the time, though, I somehow just didn’t register that they were. I really just didn’t think about it. I’m sure I’ve had friends drop me for such behaviors, and I’m sure I wondered why. In my cluelessness, I think I would have appreciated having the obvious explained to me.
Yes, I think the topic should come up. Frankly, I’ve been so busy that it’s impossible for people to tell if I’m blowing them off! Or maybe I just won’t include them for dinner again.
I wish I could invite you all over for dinner, drinks, and conversation about dinner invitation etiquette, but I live in relative BFE compared to all TGWers. Tho. funnily enough, AWB, I think you might be from near where I live, based on a bleak memory of an older post or two.
Perhaps you should have a rudeness intervention in the guise of a dinner party. Of course, that would probably backfire because none of the rude guests would show up. I agree with LP, that you should tell the steak people why you’ve dumped them. And the inviting-herself guest while you’re at it.
I had a housemate that behaved much like your spaghetti-eating friend, and it was a similar situation. I had whipped up this large batch of food and had planned on making it last for several days. He arrived home just as I was going to sit down to eat, and I felt rude not offering him some, and so I did. I took a small portion, not just because I was trying to save the rest for later, but also because I like to eat in stages, rather than piling a ton of food on my plate at the start. So I took my bit, and I went to sit down, and a few minutes later, he comes in with his plate piled so high that it was teetering over the edge. My heart sank, but I didn’t say anything; when I went into the kitchen to get more the pot was scraped clean.
It seems clear that people who would never do such unthinkably rude things are paralyzed when faced with people who do. The roomie/housemate eating our week’s food is not uncommon–I know I still hold a grudge over a huge casserole that was devoured by roomie, her bf, and his friend who I’d never met when I never even offered them any of it, and this was more than 20 yrs ago! Geez, why can’t we just say, “I can’t believe your selfishness/rudeness. You owe me!”? Why is politeness such a crutch, and why does it seem easier to stew indefinitely than confront in the moment? What would Miss Manners/Martha say we should do? I suspect they’d tell us it’s our own fault for carrying a long-term grudge over something that should have been addressed when it happened.