Cheers! Hosting dinner parties was popular in the 1970s. Photograph: ClassicStock/Alamy View image in fullscreen Cheers! Hosting dinner parties was popular in the 1970s. Photograph: ClassicStock/Alamy Life and style The dreadful decline of hosting at home: ‘I feel shame any time a friend comes over’ It used to be quite normal to pop next door for a coffee or invite friends over for dinner. But not any more. What’s behind this change – and just how damaging is it?
Leah Harper Thu 8 Oct 2026 06.00 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google ‘I really loved hosting at home years ago, before I had kids, when my house wasn’t filled with toys and I had lots of time to plan and shop,” says Rehanna, 41, from Birmingham. Now, if she’s catching up with friends, she would rather go out. “I can’t host and cook at the same time, so if I have people over it will usually be a cold buffet I have made earlier. There are so many really nice restaurants where I live that I’d prefer to go out and try something new than make an old favourite at home.”
Personally, I’d never say no to a cold buffet – but Rehanna’s story is not unusual. In the US, the number of people who regularly host friends or family fell from 42% in 1975 to 12% in 2026 – a 70% drop over the last 50 years . In the UK, the numbers are not much better: last year, a poll of 2,000 adults found that more than four in 10 British people avoid hosting at home due to the clean-up it requires. And while chef Nigella Lawson is back on TV screens demonstrating her culinary prowess on The Great British Bake Off, it wasn’t long ago that the self-proclaimed domestic goddess revealed even she had “got out of the habit” of hosting formal dinner parties .
But why have we become so unwilling to invite others into our homes – and what do we lose by only catching up in communal “third spaces”?
“When you host, quite often it feels like you’re just a spectator to your friends’ evening,” says Simon, 37, from Glasgow. In the past, he’s found that, as host, he spends so much time making sure his guests are catered for that it can be difficult to connect with them on anything other than a superficial level. “You’re not fully present because you’re either trying to anticipate their next needs or you’re not even in the same room – you’re ferrying back and forth to the fridge and you just can’t get deep in the conversation. It can feel like everybody else has more of a bond at that time, because the host is just a wee bit separate.”
We haven’t always felt this way about having people over. In fact, anthropologist Robin Dunbar , best known for “ Dunbar’s number ” – a theory that suggests humans can only really maintain about 150 stable social connections at once – believes we would still rather entertain at home given the choice, but circumstances often conspire against it. “One reason is that our social networks may have become more scattered as cities have got larger,” he says. “If we live in smaller villages and towns, it is easy to visit for casual get-togethers. There is a thing called the 30-minute rule: if someone lives more than 30 minutes away, we pretty much stop seeing them regularly. The time/effort required becomes too great.”
View image in fullscreen Too much effort? Photograph: George Marks/Getty Images It’s an idea echoed by Kamalyn Kaur , a psychotherapist and member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. “I’m an 80s child and when I was younger, people used to pop over to my m…