Invite Your Friends to Things
Extend personal invites
FARE
Free
uncoerced
Your score: —
Free
Free on both ends: you didn’t have to invite them, and they’re not required to come.
Active
participatory
Your score: —
Active
It takes direct time, effort, and intention to extend the invitation.
Relational
builds community
Your score: —
Relational
The invitation is itself a bid for connection and an expression of care, and it invites the reciprocity of showing up.
Effective
resources well used
Your score: —
Effective
People are much more likely to show up when they know you want them there.
A couple of weeks ago, I got an unexpected text from a friend. It was an invitation to their going away party; they were moving on from Oakland and they wanted to celebrate a bit and grieve a bit. And they wanted their friends to be there. Would I be able to make it?
The text was unexpected because I didn’t know they were going away — I had just moved to Oakland; I had met them at a party a couple of months before. It was also unexpected because I didn’t think I was someone they would have invited to their going away party. I had only run into them three times. I liked them, I thought we had connected a bit, but I didn’t know we were friends.
I think friendship happens in this way more often than we think — we don’t really know we’re friends until we are invited.
Proposal: Invite your friends to things
This week’s proposal is simple — in a contributist society, we extend personal invites. This is to say, we don’t just blast out bulk invites using partiful, post an instagram story for our followers, or make a facebook event and tag our friends. We ask them to come.
Before I explain why, I want to be clear about something — planning or hosting an event at all, regardless of how you invite your friends, is an enormously contributist act. When you bring people together, you give them the space to form and strengthen bonds. You are giving your time and talent to your community, and enabling them to give to each other. In my opinion, those who gather are the truest community leaders.
So I’m not criticizing those who use bulk-invitation tools to make party planning easier. I’m simply asking all gatherers (and prospective gatherers) to take a minute to consider what is lost when you do, and what is gained when you take an extra few moments per person to send a personal invite.
When my friend invited me to their going away party, a few things happened:
I realized that we were friends. As the amount of time we spend with others is sharply declining, a lot of would-be friendships these days exist in a kind of will-they/won’t-they acquaintance purgatory. You may know a lot of people, but are they your friends? Sometimes it’s hard to even know what that would look like.