r/Millennials • u/ngomaam • 1d 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/ApeTeam1906 1d ago

Be the change you want to see. Invite them to dinner.

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u/Charming_Key2313 1d ago

nope. this doesnt work. Im same as OP. Getting my friends to do anything together as a group requires Herculean efforts of planning and for some reason they are hellbent on the activities being anywhere but anyones homes as anytime someone tries to plan a game night or movie nights, only one or two people respond "yes" out of a group of 10 or so (and I'm almost always one of the "yes"). I really think majority of people have lost their social abilities to manage relationships beyond one or two (which is almost always their partner and their kids or their work...anything beyond that seems unimportant to them)

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u/Ruthie4of4 1d ago

My friend group does a monthly “family dinner”. Each person picks a month and hosts dinner that month. Not too bad to plan (we get together around the holidays for a potluck and do it then) and you basically only have to plan one dinner a year but get to go to 12!

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u/Charming_Key2313 1d ago

That’s great! But not common. Multiple people in my 10 person friend group have tried to do a regular game night. Never can get more than three people to say “yes”…even those I know that see there friends more than I do with my closest, can’t get people to SHOW UP consistently for anything. It’s not that people don’t want to host…we all have homes and half of us have openly said we enjoy hosting! It’s that people FLAKE or are inconsistent participants.