Good guests should reciprocate

So few people regularly entertain friends at home nowadays that Miss Manners has been recommending doing so as a way of perking up a depleted social life. When the departure of a spouse, partner or child leaves a social, as well as an emotional, void, it is time to set the table.

Besides providing chores that cut into time otherwise spent brooding over having been forgotten by the world, this fills a social need. It throws people together in new combinations or ones they might not otherwise have thought of, often creating new friendships and, occasionally, romances.

The entertaining Miss Manners has in mind is not necessarily elaborate. But neither is it so casual as to omit planning for the guests’ comfort, or so cavalier as to foist the host’s tasks on them. Just quiet meals at which a few people can sit down and talk.

Sure, you can do that in a restaurant. But think of doing it without anyone coming around to peer into the plates asking, “Are you still working on that?” And without your story being ruined by the question, “Is everything all right here?” just when you were about to deliver the punch line.

What Miss Manners failed to anticipate is that people who arranged such functions would be bitten by the mouths they are feeding.

That they would not be invited back in kind naturally follows if they are, indeed, entertaining people who are not in the habit of doing so themselves. But Gentle Readers tell Miss Manners that it is worse than that. They are reprimanded.

A Gentle Reader who was widowed and continues to have dinner parties reports that she gets complaints about being “too fancy” when she gives dinners the way she and her husband always did, using their best china, silver and linens. “I’m supposed to ‘lighten up,”’ she said, which means dumbing down.

“I don’t know whether my friends are saying that a house without a man in it might as well not try to be nice, or they think they’re trying to save me work, or they just resent my exerting myself because they don’t. If they’re really worried about me, why don’t they ever invite me back? Or just plain thank me, instead of making me feel bad.”

Another Gentle Reader reports that he and his wife are always being told that others don’t entertain them “because it’s too expensive. I’ll tell you what’s expensive – the restaurants they ‘invite’ us to where we’re expected to split the bill. The groceries we buy to feed them don’t count, of course. Or maybe they think that amount is cancelled out by the bottle of wine they bring. Not the kind of wine they bring, believe me.”

Notice that in both – and other such – cases, the guests keep accepting invitations, even as they keep reminding their hosts that they are being foolhardy to invite them, and should expect nothing in return.