A Full Investigation of Why Nobody Comes to My Parties

Perhaps nobody likes me, or perhaps something else is Going On Quite Strongly.

Photo by ZUZANA on Unsplash

It’s no surprise to anyone reading this that I love parties. About a year ago, I wrote about the death of child-friendly fancy holiday parties, and how they’ve been replaced by adults-only affairs, casual gatherings where kids are maybe invited, adults-only school fundraiser events involving one box of terrible wine with a $100 cover fee, and more realistically, no parties at all. Many people at the time said that I should simply be the change I want to see in the world and throw more dressy, kid-friendly parties. So I did. The verdict: nobody wants to come!

Invariably, when I throw a party, most of the people I invite don’t RSVP at all. Then, another big chunk say they’re out of town, have family in town, or already have plans. A few people say they can come, but then the day before the party, at least one of them will claim to have “something come up” and then another two will just not show at all despite saying they could make it. And then I panic that only a few people will arrive, see how almost nobody showed up, and vow never to come again. The cycle continues!

To be honest, this also shouldn’t be surprising to anyone reading my Substack. Making friends hasn’t come easily to me. For years, I’ve struggled with social cues, but I eventually taught myself how to be likable in my late twenties, which I wrote about here. And to be clear, this self-improvement process actually worked! I can tell the difference between how people treat me now, versus how people treated me when I thought it was appropriate to greet new people with, “You’ll never believe my British chav meets Lana Del Rey impression.” I wouldn’t say I’m the most charismatic, socially capable person ever, but I’m a relatively upbeat, open-minded, funny extrovert who shows lots of interest in other people and can converse about basically anything. That should be enough!

But still—I’m embarrassed to say this, but I haven’t been able to get more than six couples to attend a party (and even that is generous) since….maybe 2014. When this topic came up on Twitter this week, everyone declared that “actually I have no trouble getting people to come to my parties, not sure what your problem is” and “actually everyone is still throwing parties, even parents in the suburbs, you guys are just losers” so obviously this is a Me Thing, to some extent anyway.

This isn’t an entirely new issue for me, or even a post-pandemic issue. As a child, nobody ever came to my birthday party because I have a summer birthday and everyone was always on vacation. I wasn’t a popular kid, in part because I started at a new school district and claimed to be an alien in a skin suit to get attention, but the summer birthday thing is such a universal issue that my friend moved her August-born daughter’s birthday party to November just to get people to attend, so I know it’s not just me.

I went to boarding school and then a small college, so I didn’t really throw parties in my teens, but I resumed my party-throwing in my twenties in San Francisco, where I lived with my husband (then boyfriend). This was probably the height of my party-throwing, aided in part by the fact that my husband’s friend group and their dates were reliable attendees. I threw a lot of parties, and some of them went well. But turnout was literally always a problem. I realized I would have to invite at least twice the number of people who I wanted to attend. Every single time I threw a party, I had so much anxiety about attendance that it almost didn’t feel worth it.

Sausage fest (because I had no friends)

Now that I’m thirty-six with two kids, the parties have taken on an entirely different feel. They’re always child-friendly, if not completely oriented around kids. I do this in part because I enjoy including my kids in things, but also because I know people will be more likely to attend things if they don’t have to hire a sitter. Turnout is still abysmal—worse than ever, in fact. I’m now at the point where I’ve had to cancel parties thanks to terrible RSVP ratios.

So anyway, given that this is obviously an area of failure for me, let me examine all the possibilities of what could be the culprit.