the art of planning
a hosting manifesto
Hosting is one of my great joys in life. It is my hobby, it is perhaps…my calling? I love facilitating experiences for other people to have a good time. Like many things, hosting is both a lot of work, and also easier than you would imagine. Through repetition it can become habitual until one day you can throw together a small scale dinner party on a weeknight with minimal effort.
The thing about hosting is that people don’t want to make decisions. They want to enjoy themselves without doing the labor of imagining what sounds enjoyable, figuring out how to make it happen, and then executing it. A good host is an invisible hand guiding you through an event. A great host gives you the illusion of choice, but every decision you make is between a string of perfectly curated options.
Hosting puts your guests in a vulnerable position. They are out of their own space, unsure of where the bathroom is, might feel uncomfortable asking for a glass of water. They are a tiny baby deer wandering into a wooded grove and your job as the host is to remove all of the dangers and discomforts before they even realize these threats existed.
Hosting is the opposite of meeting someone at the bar. It is intimate to invite someone into your space, to care for them for several hours. It is an uneven exchange of labor, a gift of effort that reaps equal joy for both parties. In the Faraway Nearby Rebecca Solnit writes about the debt economy. Early civilizations operated on a barter economy— a pair of shoes for a goat, a bushel of potatoes for some bread and cheese. But these trades were imprecise by nature: it is impossible to adequately measure the worth of a pair of shoes in goats. And so debt was inescapably tied to barter, and that debt is what bound these early communities together—the shoemaker returning to the goat farmer weeks or months later to repay them with some corn, or more shoes, or by helping them build their fence, until the debt was repaid— messily and imperfectly in a way that indebted the goat farmer back to them. With the invention of money value could be parsed more easily, exchanges of goods and services confined to a single transaction. But with that, relationships also became more transactional, the weakening binds of social debt loosening our sense of civic engagement.
In my close relationships I like to keep the economy of debt alive— when I believe my friendships will last a lifetime there is plenty of time to call things even. Our debts will be repaid unevenly and sporadically, through meals, and emotional labor, and glasses of wine, and offers to carpool. Parking meters, Netflix passwords, bags of candy purchased just because. I don’t invite people over presuming that I am due an equal invitation in return, but as a small installment on my ongoing tab of friendship debt.
Not all get-togethers need to be a whole shebang. Sharing space is powerful, and inviting someone over at all is enough. There is a special type of intimacy in a truly casual dinner— you know you are in my inner circle when you come over and I serve you leftovers out of my fridge or “pasta toss-up” (any vegetable I can find with some veggie sausage and pasta.) Letting people into your home when it is messy and lived-in and imperfect is vulnerable, and vulnerability begets closeness. That said, these are my basic principles for hosting at more elite level: