What are you up to next Saturday?” I asked a close friend recently, at the end of an evening. “Oh, er, nothing,” she replied, with a shifty air that implied she absolutely, definitely was up to something. “It’s, just, awkward, because…” she added, sounding slow and ominous like a creaky door in a horror movie. “OK. Jan and Mary are having a dinner party. I’m going with Mike, plus Sarah and Jack, Sam and Paula are going, and…”. And, well, I wasn’t invited, clearly. Pretty much an entire friendship circle was meeting, but because it was under the guise of the oh-so-special “dinner party”, it was just the couples and not the singletons who were asked. This wasn’t the first time I’ve been burned and spurned by my peers. There’s been a long-running war between couples and singletons played out over the dinner party scene for a while now. But this latest snub was the last straw. You can – with respect – shove your dinner parties (that I’m not invited to): dinner parties are dead anyway.
There’s an eerie stagnancy around the dinner party today. While we love to laugh at hilariously gross, over-the-top showstopper recipes from decades ago (such as the ones collected in Anna Pallai’s book, 70s Dinner Party), there was at least an undeniable vibrancy around the act of throwing a dinner party back then – even if you were being served jellied spam or a nest of frankfurters. While a Waitrose report this year claimed that a third of UK adults thought the term “dinner party” was old-fashioned, people still hold them, of course. But it’s telling that 2023 hasn’t produced an all-conquering and buzzy cookbook that simply everybody (dahling) is cooking from. Think of all those preserved lemons and sumac you ingested when Ottolenghi was a thing. Possibly the only significant development has been Nigella Lawson’s revelation that even she’s stopped having big, extravagant dinner parties and just serves roast chicken and a bowl of Twiglets instead of a starter.
I think what the general dialogue around the dinner party gets wrong is thinking they’re about the food. It’s a big mistake. In reality, as any deeply jaded dinner party exile like me knows full well, they’re an exercise in control, plain and simple. I really do think middle-class dinner parties subordinate their guests more than we acknowledge. They’ve always been a walking minefield for anyone lacking airs and graces, for example. From not knowing the difference between a salad fork and a fish fork, to turning up to a dinner party in a gentrified area of London with the wrong kind of natural wine. Moreover, an overzealous host can make the experience so despotic that you feel almost like a captive: told where to sit, forced to talk to strangers and nod your head to conversation so anodyne it that makes your spleen itch, all the while – with unthinking obedience – heaping praise on your host for their ingenious use of Szechuan peppercorns.
I’ve often suspected that couples don’t invite single people because they’ve probably realised that they’re unlikely to get a reciprocal meal out of it. They’re absolutely right, to be fair. Or at least, not a very good meal. From my experience, hosting a dinner party on your own is absolute agony for everyone involved. Trying to do light chat while burning four dishes at once is a real bind. Even just having the space (in shared accommodation, say) to host, or a big enough table or sufficient plates, cutlery and fancy glasses for wine are increasingly rare. It’s great that Nigella wants to pare down to a simple roast chicken, but imagine if she went an extra step and normalised serving delicious meat juices out of a plastic measuring jug rather than a gravy boat? That would be heaven.
While Nigella thinks that the starter is out, from my point of view, all dinner parties start with an amuse-bouche made of pure, delicious smugness – that you (and your partner) were invited in the first place. It’s not uncommon for single people en masse to feel a sense of exclusion – that their partnered pals all hang out at each other’s houses without them. It’s a trend that seems to defy age too: as soon as couples get couply, they very quickly start preferring the company of their own kind. I have a micro sympathy for the coupled community here. According to the research of Dan King of the National University of Singapore and Chris A Janiszewski of the University of Florida, humans are pre-programmed to favour an even number to an odd number. It’s why we’d trust a brand called WD-40 and not WD-37, and why a couple might only want other couples to keep numbers even. Maybe it’s why an After Eight isn’t called After Nine.
The even-numbered dinner party has become a vital support group for couples. A place for them to be safely among their tribe, unthreatened by the liberty of their single friends. A place to go “Well, this is nice” without being around single people who – you suspect – are having lurid and excellent casual sex. A place to talk about important couple stuff like soft furnishings without having to be provoked into thinking, “Oh Christ, am I sure this relationship is making me happy?” by the presence of a happy-go-lucky singleton who doesn’t own a gravy boat but seems to be having a great time in life. You can convince yourself that being in couple life is still super edgy by doing a bit of drugs after dinner (that, let’s be real, you had to score off a single friend). Or you can go the other way and revel in being boring and having an insanely early night. But what you can’t do is know for sure that your single friends are doing OK, if you never see them, or if you ensconce yourself in a life surrounded by Twiglets, natural wine and other couples.
‘As soon as couples get couply, they very quickly start preferring the company of their own kind’
