Have People Over!
· The Atlantic
The nation’s welcome mats have been doing a lot less welcoming lately. Although Americans have been spending much more time at home in recent years—an hour and 39 minutes more a day in 2022 than in 2003—they aren’t inviting other people in. The percentage of people who hosted or attended a social event on an average day has fallen by 50 percent over the past couple of decades. Socializing of any kind declined over that same period, and isolation rose. These days, it seems, home is where people go to be alone.
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According to a report from the American Psychological Association, more than half of Americans often or sometimes feel isolated from others. Yet they have also been feeling more stressed in recent years, and when people are stressed, the APA report found, a common reaction is to cancel social plans.
All of these stats paint a picture of a nation full of tense, isolated individuals hunkering down at home because the idea of, say, going to a party—let alone throwing one—seems too daunting. Cue the novelty T-shirts that say things like Sorry I’m late, I didn’t want to come, or … And this is why I wanted to stay home. All this right here. Also cue the John Mulaney line about how canceling plans is like heroin: “It is an amazing feeling.”
[Read: Americans need to party more]
But when people trade social time for me time, they are sacrificing what research has found is the No. 1 predictor of a happy life: relationships. So what should you do when you’re missing your friends but you’re totally exhausted? You could force yourself to go out more. Or you could radically readjust your expectations. Just have people over! If you want to be at home anyway—and apparently many people do—why not invite some friends to pop by? Don’t make it a big deal. They can just join in whatever you were going to do anyway: watch TV, play with the kids, eat a Trader Joe’s frozen dinner. Fold clothes? Why not?
Low-stakes visits make maintaining a social life much easier. But if the casual visit is going to really take off, a couple of attitudes will need to change. One is the widespread sense that homes are sanctuaries reserved for oneself and one’s immediate family. The other is the pressure that many people feel, when they do host, to be at their very best. Fix those instincts, and hanging out might yet make a comeback.
Is a home a retreat from the outside world or a gathering place that invites others in? Ideally, it would be both. But many Americans have come to treat their home as a private fortress. One turn toward the private happened in the mid-20th century, when the front porch, an essential part of 19th-century homes, fell out of favor, and homebuyers began to clamor instead for the more private spaces of patios and backyards. More recently, the desire for security features such as video doorbells and burglar alarms has helped make homes seem less welcoming to outsiders. And during the coronavirus pandemic, many people had no choice but to stay home—a habit that has lingered like a pile of laundry you just can’t bring yourself to put away.
American houses certainly have room for friends to drop by. The average home size in the United States is among the biggest in the world, comparable only to the size of homes in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. And a report from Realtor.com found that the number of empty bedrooms in U.S. homes was higher in 2023 than at any point since 1970—plenty of space for an impromptu Scrabble round (and a sleepover if it goes late). Kate Fox, a librarian at the Rhode Island School of Design who worked on a traveling Smithsonian exhibit about the rise of backyards, told me she sees a “huge gap” between a home “as this very aspirational social space, but then how it’s actually used is really different than how it’s designed.” (Seemingly every person on House Hunters yearns for an open-plan kitchen that’s “perfect for entertaining.”)
Not even the wealthiest people with the biggest houses appear to be immune to this disconnect. In 2021, Mark Ellwood wrote for the luxury lifestyle magazine Robb Report about visitor-discouraging design choices the rich were making for their homes—things such as installing long driveways and eliminating doorbells. Ellwood diagnosed them with “Big House Small Welcome Syndrome.”
[Read: Why are American homes so big?]
All of that space, so rarely shared. Further compounding the sense that homes are primarily places of refuge, many people in the media—both social and traditional—now celebrate staying home alone as a form of self-care. But socializing can be replenishing too—especially the kind done in homey comfort. “Yes, the home can be a zone of privacy, and it can be a zone to recharge individually,” Chelsea Fagan, the author of the hosting guide Having People Over, told me. “But it is also, I don’t think, in any way correct or superior to view the home as, first and foremost, a center for privacy and isolation.” Doors are meant to be opened from time to time.
Even those who want to host may find themselves intimidated by the prospect. It can feel like just one more thing on their to-do list. Or many things: clean the kitchen, restock the toilet paper, email the invites, build a menu, send someone out to get ice at the last minute.
It’s true that just having people over requires a nonzero amount of effort. When I was a kid, if I wanted to invite my friends to my house, I had to clean it first. The belief that our home has to be “presentable” for “company” seems to haunt many people. Whenever I’m hosting a big party, it possesses me like a demon, and the demon makes me do things such as yell at my husband about how we don’t own enough bowls, we never have, and soon everyone will know us for the bowl-less losers that we are.
Don’t do this. In fact, don’t make hosting complicated at all.
Arranging everything just so is ostensibly an act of service to your guests, to make them feel comfortable and cared for. But the pre-company cleaning frenzy is often mainly about the host, their own ego, and their own fears, Jack King, an Anglican priest, told me. “Is this actually about me? So they can see our home looking well, and they come away saying, ‘Oh, that was great, the Kings’ home was so lovely’?” he said. “That’s not why we did this.” More than 10 years ago, King wrote a blog post advocating for lowering the standard of preparation and embracing “scruffy hospitality,” a term that has since been taken up by many others. “Hospitality is not a house inspection, it’s friendship,” he wrote. The casual visit is scruffy hospitality par excellence. It makes socializing less of an event, and more just part of life.
Fagan seems to be of two minds about this. Although her book is full of tips for hosting with more care, not less, and keeping a tidy space ready for guests to drop by, it also argues for “sharing the intimate, beautiful tedium of your life.” When we spoke, she told me that her “optimal level of connection” looks a lot like scruffy hospitality, where “you don’t have to do anything in order to enjoy each other’s company.” But, she said, it takes a bit more formality and effort to become intimate with new friends in the first place. I’ve found that to be true: A gathering of acquaintances can still send me into a bowl-seeking spiral. But reaching the level of intimacy where I can just announce to my closest friends that I’m not going to clean up for them brings a lot of relief.
King told me that if he were to update his hospitality post for today, he would add the word spontaneous. A barrier to socializing that he’s noticed in the years since he first wrote it is “the congestion of the calendar.” Many parents like him have lives that revolve around highly scheduled and organized kids’ activities. And, kids or no kids, he’s noticed that “it’s taboo to ask somebody on the spot to get together.” The norm of planning a hangout is too often a long, soul-sucking scheduling thread.
In his original post, King suggested that readers ask themselves the question: “What does it look like to welcome people into my humility rather than my standard of excellence?”
For me, it looks like regularly asking friends whether they want to come over tonight, or tomorrow, and not minding if the answer is no—because I didn’t put much effort into planning anyway. It looks like dragging out whatever random snacks are already in the cupboard rather than feeling pressure to curate a menu. And, because fair is fair, it looks like sometimes going to my friends’ houses to sit on their couches in my sweatpants. Lowering expectations can feel vulnerable, but vulnerability builds closeness.
Welcoming someone into the real, lived-in state of your home gives them permission to worry less about their own imperfections. The same goes for welcoming people into your life: Open the door, and don’t mind the mess.
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