Confessions of a Bad Host
Throwing parties in a lonely world
This Weekly Edition of Inkwell features Ben Christenson
IT ALL STARTED when I saw Footloose.
Though my Christian high school was not so strict that it banned dancing, I must have felt some subconscious spiritual connection to Kevin Bacon’s character. Shortly after watching it, I invited my entire senior class over for a dance party. I wanted to be cool, to party, to shout “Let’s Dance!!!”
As you might guess, though—absent the charisma of Kevin Bacon—the party left something to be desired. In a desperate attempt to ignite the dance floor, I struck up a vigorous “crisscross step.” But I was too vain, too inexperienced. I rolled my ankle so badly that I missed a month of basketball. I then had to tell my coach and teammates that the culprit was Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up.”
Those are the kinds of scars that never heal.
MICHAEL JORDAN ONCE SAID, “I've missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
While I am not the Michael Jordan of hosting, I have half of the equation down: I have hosted lots of bad events. If 100% of the shots you don’t take won’t go in, I have shot and missed the net many, many times. After the Footloose debacle and some rough events in the interim, I thought my problems were solved when I read The 2-Hour Cocktail Party by Nick Gray. It’s basically “Hosting for Dummies,” presenting scripts to invite friends, step-by-step guides to set up a drink table, and the author even gave free consultations. It literally could not be simpler.
Nevertheless, the first time I hosted a party using his method, it bombed. The guide said to just offer wine and a self-serve bar, but no one seemed capable of making a drink for themselves. No one wanted to open a bottle of wine, so most people chose to drink sparkling water.
There weren’t enough people, so we had a few distinct conversation circles that you couldn’t leave. You could also sort of hear everybody else in the room, and everyone took turns speaking one at a time. Some guests came, made one lap around the room, and left. We never spoke again. Others promised they would be there, and I treasured their RSVP, only to watch the minutes and then hours go by, slowly realizing they weren’t coming. By the end of the night, I was itching to send everyone home. I wanted to put them out of their misery. Then I wanted to crawl in a hole and die.
This was my first and most important lesson. Hosting is a skill, and with our rampant “loneliness epidemic,” it takes a lot of effort to put together a successful, well-attended event. Your guests will not kiss your feet for taking on this public health crisis. A lot of Hosting Discourse almost sounds resentful about this: “Here I am, busting my butt to build community, and these ungrateful guests can’t even be bothered to honor an RSVP!”
While I wouldn’t advocate for creating a village while hating on all the villagers, the way
explained it to me was helpful: It’s not impossible, but it is hard. So you can either use your energy complaining and exonerating yourself, or you can work to overcome the well-documented impediments to community building. I choose the latter.
THE SECOND BIGGEST LESSON I learned is that there is no “right way” to host. Like so much of internet writing, the fringe on both ends is loud, certain, and allergic to nuance. Within the various schools of thought on hosting, the spectrum runs from what I call “The Planners” to “The Chillers.”
The Planners are represented by The 2-Hour Cocktail Party, The Art of Gathering, Building the Benedict Option, and many others. Planners are an articulate, intellectual, conscientious bunch that present a compelling case for how and why to host. This methodical, didactic approach gives them credibility. They’ve thought this stuff through.
Of course, their nuanced books end up dumbed down and radicalized for the algorithms. In my head, the voice of the Extreme Planner is shouting something like this:
“Events need an explicit purpose! Guests need to RSVP ASAP so that subsequent invitees will be impressed with the cool people at your party. Events are for connections! In this room could be your future spouse, your next client, or your new chess partner.”
The mentality that undergirds it all: This is serious business! We’re talking about the rebuilding of the infrastructure of the frayed, atomized, post-industrial, post-capitalist, post-Christian society, dangit! This is the village. This is what everyone’s whining about, but you’re doing it, you’re making a difference, you’re not like the rest of those pro-community keyboard warriors. You’re actually doing the work.
This approach pricks the conscience of other would-be Planners. Ask me how I know.
WHILE THE PLANNERS DOMINATE the conversation, there is a vocal minority that I’ll call “The Chillers.” They are reacting against the barriers to entry that make hosting seem out of reach for ordinary mortals. You may have heard of “scruffy hospitality,” a concept popularized by the Anglican priest Rev. Jack King.
Come as you are, serve simple dishes, and host far more than you would if you were shackled by impossible expectations. Parents of young children do not have spotless homes, and they should not delay hosting until the day their floors are free of dirt and Magna-tile.
Chillers and Planners find some overlap on the need for third places, “calling culture,” and other social technologies that don’t require constant text messaging and rescheduling to maintain. But Chillers probably wouldn’t actually use terms like “social technologies” to describe wanting to hang out with friends more.
Of course, Chillers can still end up radical and sanctimonious. The militant Chiller in my head sounds something like this:
“When I go over to someone’s house and the Cheerios are on the floor and the diapers are piled in the corner and the dinner is spaghetti and meatballs, I’m not offended. I’m honored.”
The undergirding mentality: I haven’t showered in three days, I wear John Cena T-shirts around the house, and sometimes, when we’ve run out of milk, I put water in my cereal. And I wanna bring you into all of that unfiltered, unedited, unguarded LIFE.
I kid, I kid. But only a little.
HELL IS IMAGINED as a place with no neighbors in The Great Divorce. Everyone is so quarrelsome and selfish that they keep moving further and further away from each other. Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar, and Henry the Fifth are already light-years away and still moving.
As Lewis wrote later in the book: “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell, choose it.” In modern parlance, we might say, “Hell is a revealed preference.”
For all the talk about wanting “a village,” most Americans are atomized because they prefer it. At least, that’s what they choose when given the option. Suburbs grew out of consumer demand, and a lot of communitarian living of yore was actually an inescapable result of impoverished living conditions. If you wanted community bad enough, you could still find it. But you might have to give up your lawn, your privacy, your autonomy. As Helen Roy reflected after a year with her family abroad, when your child cries on a bus in Budapest, a Babushka materializes out of thin air to soothe the baby. But by the same token, when your child isn’t wearing her winter coat, a Babushka materializes to scold you. Most Americans have chosen the lawn over the Babushka.
While everyone knows that relationships are important generally, it is easy, moment-to-moment, evening after evening, to choose the path of least resistance. This is a broader trend of life in the digital age that
recently wrote about: “The new era is killing us softly, by drawing people out of the real and into the virtual, distracting us from the activities that sustain ordinary life, and finally making existence at a human scale seem obsolete. In this environment, survival will depend on intentionality and intensity.”If you are unwilling to fight for more humane ways of relating, they will slip away.
I put no stock in hosts complaining about the flaking, the busyness, and the inconvenience of it all. Not because the complaints aren’t true, but because that’s the whole point. Other people infringe on us and inconvenience us, and so we withdraw, and that’s what got us into this mess in the first place. On a spiritual level, we shouldn’t be surprised that our culture seems to be accelerating in the wrong direction.
As Douthat concluded in that same column, the challenge is not merely to talk, perform, or post about the changes we want. Instead, it’s to “go out into reality and do” because if we are not “deliberate and self-conscious and a little bit fanatical about ensuring that the things [we] love are carried forward,” then they won’t be. Deliberate, self-conscious, and a little bit fanatical—now that’s a hosting philosophy I could get behind.
WHILE IT MIGHT SOUND CLICHÉ or even self-aggrandizing, I try to think about hosting as something to offer up to God rather than something grand that I am doing. For my guests, I hope to carve out a very human space in a dehumanizing culture. And for myself, I accept that my ego will take some body blows. It’s not always pleasant, but like any hard experience, there are also moments of joy, growth, and satisfaction at a job well done.
You have to be prudent about what approach best fits your community and temperament, knowing that any strategy will require some ingenuity and grit. Going against the grain guarantees some resistance. While some throw up their hands in frustration, I see those challenges as a sign that I’m on the right track.
If you want greatness, you must struggle.
If you want a village, you must embrace the villagers.
If you want a dance party, you’ve gotta break some ankles.
Ben Christenson
Writer & Editor
Ben has written for Hearth & Field, Front Porch Republic, Mere Orthodoxy, and others. He writes while his (amazing) wife watches their three kids, three dogs, one cat, and innumerable chickens. You can read more of his work at benjaminchristenson.com.
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Ben! This was fantastic. I live alone and have been wrestling with the opportunities and challenges of hosting from both a logistical and financial level, but particularly an emotional and ego level. What you’re exploring here was particularly helpful to me! And so timely; I’m hosting two friends tonight haha. One of the greatest compliments I’ve ever received was when a friend told me that being hosted in my apartment for the weekend felt like being in a version of home she had been homesick for. I didn’t do anything special, but perhaps it was the idea you present in your conclusion here: “I try to think about hosting as something to offer up to God rather than something grand that I am doing. For my guests, I hope to carve out a very human space in a dehumanizing culture. And for myself, I accept that my ego will take some body blows. It’s not always pleasant, but like any hard experience, there are also moments of joy, growth, and satisfaction at a job well done.”
Thank you for this!
Great thoughts here, Ben! I think part of the reason so little hosting/hospitality is happening right now is because it is *so difficult* to be the first one to step outside the current norm (which is often zero social events with neighbors) and make an invitation/host a gathering. But once that initial barrier is broken, everything becomes easier.