Fine then, I won’t have a party

On the cancel-last-mintue trend, and why it matters

Not long ago I had a conversation with one of my teens about the challenges that come with spearheading events with friends. It’s not easy to get people to do things together, even when they theoretically want to. We commiserated over this. “What I find,” he said, “is that when you propose an idea to do something fun, everyone’s excited and into it. Everyone says they’ll come. But when you set a date and nail things down, it shifts. And the closer you are to the event, the more people fall off.” He says he finds the 24 to 48 hours before is when tides really start to turn for people’s attendance plans.

This is normal, right? Not everybody can make it to everything – we all have busy lives. And not everybody is good at communicating. We can’t expect everyone we invite to show up for our thing, to help our idea materialize.

True… but not so fast. What’s happening today is actually novel. And not in a good way.

In her Substack post “Go Where You’re Invited,” Katherin Johnson Martinko of The Analog Family shares this:

In “a video with therapist Esther Perel, she spoke about the rising incidence of people cancelling events at the last minute, with various excuses (some good, some lame) for why they can't attend. Perel described a woman who prepared brunch for six friends, only to have five bail an hour before it was scheduled to start.

There are more than 1,000 comments on her video, many offering heartwrenching examples of similar experiences. One woman described her bridal shower, where a friend's grandmother prepared an elaborate celebration, but 19 guests cancelled the day of. Only one showed up. The woman said it was embarrassing and dehumanizing.

Another described a Halloween party that she spent days planning. It cost a lot to buy the food, decorations, and cocktail mix, then only three out of 12 people showed up. "I felt unimportant," the woman wrote. She stopped hosting events.

One commenter said a friend cancelled by text 40 minutes before she was supposed to arrive, saying she "didn't want to wake her husband up from a nap."

Martinko refers to this as “a glut of flakiness” and says, “It appears we're living in a time when people don't hesitate to bail on their friends for reasons that range from justifiable to absurd.” And she’s right.

Why has this become a norm in our culture? I would offer three reasons (and no surprise, natural law helped me with all of them).

First (and both Perel and Martinko mention this), it’s now very easy to not follow through on plans in a way that avoids the reality of the inviter’s feelings… by texting them. By texting, you can distance yourself and make everything seem casual and informal. You don’t look the person in the eye or even hear their voice, so you can ignore their disappointment that you aren’t following through. This is especially the case if a gathering was proposed virtually via text thread or an Evite; a virtual “can’t make it” keeps the whole thing in the theoretical realm for the invitee. There was never embodiment; there still isn’t embodiment. The gathering is simply a concept that, it turns out, doesn’t intersect with me and my actions after all.

Second, there’s little emphasis on true friendship today because so often those we call “friends” are acquaintances with whom we’re only casually connected via social media. In these virtual connections we know facets of a person’s lives through posts and photos, but we don’t really know them. It’s vague. Nothing is expected. In true friendships (i.e., in friendship, the basic good), we know people’s actuals joys and sorrows and they know ours – and both sides care. There’s reciprocity. So in a culture of friendship actions are thoughtful and earnest, even if the friends aren’t that close yet. But a culture of non-friendship yields actions that are more self-centered than reciprocal; there’s a lack regard for others’ joys and sorrows. Our current culture of non-friendship contributes greatly to the epidemic of loneliness that we face in America today. And likewise, it’s partly responsible for the last-minute party no shows.

Thirdly, social media is itself often a cheap substitute for a party. Before social media, the way to interact with a number of other people in fun, stimulating ways was to gather. At the gathering you hear or tell jokes, share stories, learn something new, maybe listen to music or even dance (or watch others dance). These various actions together make up an enjoyable social experience for everyone; they’re the point. But if you’re watching TikTok or Instagram reels or YouTube shorts, you experience many or all of these activities in a synthetic way – from the comfort of your own living room, while wearing PJs. The watching asks nothing of you, and seems to give all the same experiences. You don’t have to get dressed, drive somewhere, make or tolerate small talk. Social media is a party counterfeit. Whenever there are cheap substitutes for actual goods (in this case friendship and sociability), our appetites tempt us to take the easy way out… and we let ourselves believe that we’ll flourish as much using the substitute as we would pursuing the reality. But it’s a lie. There are no shortcuts to flourishing. You wind up first less happy, and second, an objectively worse person (because pursuing the goods is what creates virtue and builds your character). Lose-lose.

Gatherings are still worth having, probably more worth having now than they ever have been before (again: loneliness epidemic that’s shortening lifespans). Friendship is vital to our wellbeing and our souls, and gatherings promote them. Hospitality’s a life force we all need and must cultivate. So the solution cannot be: “Fine then, I won’t have a party.”

Instead, let’s return to embodiment, engaging person to person, eye to eye or (at minimum) voice to voice rather than texting, as often as we can. Let’s renew focus on real friendship and cull the virtual kind. And let’s minimize social media use – ourselves and our children’s. This is yet one more place where social media usually creates subpar thought patterns, cultural expectations, and behaviors. We don’t need ‘em. And finally: let’s have a party! And go to the gatherings you’re invited to – trade out the PJ’s, get in the car, and go. Martinko offers great practical advice about how to sidestep the negative patterns and make it a success. I’ll end with a great one that is her final takeaway: “Don't be a flake! In a world rife with unreliability, be the one others can always count on to show up when you've said you will.”