21 Facts About Throwing Good Parties
For New York’s No 1 Socialite, A.
1) Prioritize your ease of being over any other consideration: parties are like babies, if you’re stressed while holding them they’ll get stressed too. Every other decision is downstream of your serenity: e.g. it's better to have mediocre pizza from a happy host than fabulous hors d'oeuvres from a frazzled one.
2) Advertise your start time as a quarter-to the hour. If you start an event at 2:00, people won't arrive till 2:30; if you make it 1:45, people will arrive at 2:00.
3) Invite a few close friends to come 30-60 mins earlier to set up / eat dinner with you / hang out / whatever, so that when the start time approaches you’re already having fun instead of stressing that nobody will come.
4) Most people will only go to a party where they expect to know 3+ others already.
5) Use an app like Partiful or Luma that shows the guest list to invitees. Start by inviting your closest friends, get some yesses, then expand from there.
6) Send the invites in chat groups (or visibly cc’ed emails) to clusters of 4-5 people who know each other, so they can see that their friends are also going.
7) When inviting people individually, namedrop mutual friends who are invited or coming.
8) In a small group, the quality of the experience will depend a lot on whether the various friends blend together well. Follow your instinct on this, even if your instinct feels rude. It’s like cooking a dish, two ingredients can each be fabulous and still not go well together.
9) A large party is more like an Everything Soup: you mainly need to avoid ingredients that ruin the flavor for everyone else; beyond that you can mostly throw in whatever and see what works.
10) Regardless, try not to feel bad about not-inviting someone if your heart says they would make the party less-fun for others. Make peace with gatekeeping because if you don't exclude a small % of people you will ultimately lose everyone else. Someone can be a good person and a bad fit for your party, so don't think of it as a judgement on their soul. All of this is easier in theory than in practice.
11) Most events are better when roughly gender-balanced. Prioritize inviting people of the gender you’d likely have fewer of, then top up invites with the other. Once an event crosses a threshold (maybe 70%?) of male-or-female dominance, most people of the other gender are likely to decline (or just not-come to your next party) as a result. So there's ultimately two equilibria, "roughly gender balanced" and "extremely uncomfortably unbalanced," and you need to stay in the attraction basin for balance. To do this, keep your invite ratio at worst 60-40 in either direction, in order to prevent a downward spiral.
12) Co-host parties with someone you like a lot but who isn't in your exact social circle, so that your two friend-sets can intermingle.
13) Figure out the flake rate in your social circles (the % of people who will RSVP yes and flake on the day), and set your invite numbers with that in mind. In my circles, consistently 1/3rd of people who say they will be there will actually not.
14) Couples often flake together. This changes the probability distribution of attendees considerably, and so your chance of losing a quorum in a small-group setting. Small-group couple-events (e.g. 3-4 couple dinner parties) are very hard to manage in a high-flake society, as a result.
15) Create as much circulation at your party as you can. People circulate more when standing than when sitting, so try to encourage standing for those who can e.g. by having high-top tables, or taking away chairs from around tables, or leaving shelves and counter-tops open for people to rest their plates and drinks.
16) Put the food in one part of the room and the drinks in another, or spread the food and drinks out around the space, so that people have lots of excuses to move around the room.
17) If someone arrives at your party and doesn’t know anybody, welcome them and then place them with another group or person. Ideally you can pick someone they’d specifically get along well with, at second-best just someone who’s friendly and easy to talk to, but ultimately you can just insert them in any group that’s nearby and open. The main point is to prevent them having to butt in on strangers themselves, which for many people is mortifying, while your Host Privilege allows you to do it for them.
18) To leave a group conversation, just slowly step back and then step away. Don't draw attention to your leaving or you’ll be pulled back in. It feels mildly weird to do this but it’s worth it.
19) Throughout the party, prioritize introducing people to each other and hosting the people who are new or shy, even at the cost of getting less time hanging out with your best friends yourself. Parties are a public service, and the guests will (hopefully) pay you back for this by inviting you to parties of their own.
20) Let me repeat that: Parties are a public service, you’re doing people a favor by throwing them. Someone might meet their new best friend or future lover at your gathering. In the short term, lovely people may feel less lonely, and that's thanks to you. In the long term, whole new children may ultimately exist in the world because you bothered to throw a party. Throwing parties is stressful for most people, but a great kindness to the community, so genuinely pat yourself on the back for doing this.
21) The biggest problem at many parties is an endless escalation of volume. If you know how to fix this, let me know.