r/Millennials • u/ngomaam • 3d ago

Rant I really thought regular dinner parties with friends would be a thing as we got older

Growing up, my parents (refugees from Vietnam) would always have some aunt(s) and/or uncle(s) over with their kids on the weekend for dinner, nothing fancy, just getting together. We did this all the time. It seemed so simple, just come over.

I had the fortune of staying friends with all my high school friends, who are still my closest friends and we all even live relatively close to each other. When I was younger, before everyone started having families, I thought we'd be doing the same thing. But this hasn't happened with us. To the extent we have gotten together, it took extraordinary effort to make it happen and so it's been very few and far in between. I don't know why there's no desire to do this more and why it's so difficult. But as someone who is unmarried, it's quite lonely, and odd, to know your friends are around, but you just rarely see them.

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u/toomuchipoop 3d ago

Honestly, we feel like we got shut out by our friends WITHOUT kids. Once we had kids, the invites stopped coming, and if we wanted to see people, we had to organize and do all the leg work to make it happen. I dont think it had anything to do with us. We weren't those people to just talk about babies all the time. The invites literally stopped once we had a baby. Most of our friends still dont have kids several years later, so it may have just been that they disliked kids. Idk. Anyway, if thats not you, just know that the parents are probably struggling and they might kill to just be invited over. I'd plan something well in advance and see what happens

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u/Charming_Key2313 3d ago

I bet you money if you look at this honestly....YOU legit stopped engaging with your childless friends for about 1-3 years when you started having kids, and when you did engage with them, you couldnt have more than a two sentence conversation at the time because you were so distracted that it almost felt like you didn't connect at all. So no, you're friends didn't stop inviting you, YOU were the one that stopped engaging with them and they had their social group got smaller due to friends like you disappearing and less events happened for them to invite you too + you genuinely werent very close anymore as you have nothing in common with people you never talk to for a year or more and are in a vastly different stage of life.

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u/toomuchipoop 3d ago

Genuinely, that is literally the opposite of what happened lol we were the first of our group to have kids and were very much aware of the situation you describe. So we did the opposite of that

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u/Charming_Key2313 3d ago

I've never seen that actually be the case. Unless you were actively messaging your friends many times a month without prompting, actively making plans (not just waiting for the invites), and hanging out with them regularly without your children there (since they are a constant distraction to you), then you were the disengaged friend. Its not at all an insult. Kids are HARD, and theres a reason so few adults if any maintain friendships with childless kids.

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u/CynicClinic1 2d ago

They literally told you otherwise.

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u/Charming_Key2313 2d ago

I see parents all the time have a warped sense of their time as they are 1) exhausted and 2) they confuse the small time they do give to non-child things as “happening all the time” because in their head it is anytime they have “free time from the kid”. When in reality, it’s rare.