Reverting to the conversation about friendship, I would like to raise a question. Living on the East Coast, and being used to slightly different social conventions, I find that people here usually want to invite two or even three couples to a dinner party. This can be fun, and if you are lucky, you can have a great time at a dinner party with six or eight people in the room. I have nothing against it. On the other hand, I believe that dinner parties are also about friends and intimacy. You can focus on another couple so much more easily than on six other people, ask questions, get up to date, understand their views, their problems and attitudes. Why do so few people seem to think of inviting just another couple? Is it convention? Is it because they assume their guests come in the hope of discovering some new, entertaining friends? If it is for a mixture of reasons, what are they?
This week I discovered another virtue of the smaller dinner party that you describe. Two young friends (early thirties) came for a convivial evening. What surprised me is that had it been a larger group of 6 or 8, certainly we would have talked politics. Instead, given that we knew each other’s sympathetic sympathies (!) we meandered into totally unexpected byways: our high school experiences, cooking (both turned out to be amateur chefs– something I didn’t know about them), how to set citrus skins on fire and other not-world-shaking activities.
Two of us went through Catholic schools but with a difference. In the 1950s we wore uniforms and were relatively innocent of class differences because the plaid jumpers masked so much.
The young man who graduated from a Catholic high school in 1995 said that despite the uniforms, there were ways of telling the status of various students. For example, what kind of cars did their parents drive when they picked them up? (In the 1950s you took a streetcar to school). Another giveaway that the young live in a new social world: in casual conversations around the holidays the question in the 1990s was not: “Are you going skiing?” but “Where will you ski?”
A different objective takes hold when you decrease the number of guests. With six or eight you consider whose interests (and personalities) might mesh with someone else’s. With only two or three others, though, the implied assumption is that we are enough company for each other without requiring particular linkages. We are completely open as close friends.
If forced to choose I’d go for 80% intimate, stressless, and small and the occasional 20% devoted to managing “connecting points” among people who might not otherwise know each other.
I guess a dinner party can serve several functions. Certainly it’s difficult to develop a feeling of intimacy with 6 or 8 people, but then if a couple of these people have a good sense of humor it can be fun. Some people perform well with an audience! And the unexpected can happen. And you can learn things by pooling of ideas. On the other hand, trying to anticipate who will have fun together is not always easy. So the risk is greater, and the stakes are higher, since more people are involved.