Sunday Suppers: How I Started Seeing My Friends Again

Why getting together with friends is so hard, and our Sunday Supper solution

Many years ago, a couple we’d met invited us over for shabbat dinner and we joined them in their home for a simple meal and wonderful conversation. It was noteworthy because it was open-ended and authentic. It was over regular food, nothing fancy, while their kids played in their home. We came away feeling like we’d gotten to know them much better.

I’ve thought about this dinner over the years, realizing I wanted more of these. Simple, easy, and authentic. But my calendar was full of the wrong things.

In our working household with a young child, between work, kids classes and events, and the logistics of life, I felt my schedule didn’t allow these types of events. I felt insubstantial. I was surrounded by people, but didn’t speak with them. I had conversations, but they were shallow and in passing. I wanted something to change.

The solution we cooked up is something we now call “Sunday Suppers” which are semi-regular events where we have friends at our home for dinner.

Schedule Tetris, aka why gatherings are so hard

There is an underlying root to the problem: Schedule Tetris. Have you ever played? It’s when you try to schedule a personal hangout into two overpacked schedules. Schedule Tetris happens all the time among my friends, and looks like this:

Me: Let’s catch up! When are you free? How about next Saturday?

Friend: I would love to! I don’t have Saturday because we’re going to a wedding, but I have next month 18th or the following week 25th in the afternoon.

Me: Ok, I can’t do that because family is in town and then we have a recital, but how about the week after that? 1st of the month?

Friend: We’re traveling but I could do 2nd?

Me: Yes! See you next year!

This, my friends, is how you pre-book hangouts several weeks or months in a advance, jigsawing time with friends into the slim cracks of our schedules.

Schedule Tetris is exhausting. It requires a proactive energy which I don’t always have. Despite my best intentions to see the people I cared about, we were lucky if we could make it happen quarterly.

Solving Schedule Tetris

We took the problem apart. The issue is that Schedule Tetris was solving for the wrong outcome. It focuses on, when is a good time and place for me to spend time with this one person? This resulted in a lot of customized events with varying time and locations. A lot of work.

The outcome I wanted to solve instead is, how do I have a regular cadence of meaningful time spent with the friends I care about? It didn’t need to be that person this weekend, but could be any of a number of people.

We started by identifying a regular set of times where we as a family are available. For us, Sunday evenings were consistently the best times for us. These approximately every-3-weeks slots live on our calendar as open calendar events that either of us can edit. It creates a default date and time where we’re available. Then, to solve the guest issue, we created a running list of people who we would love to see. This became our invite list.

Rather than solving for the individual, we were now solving for filling the slots. Schedule Tetris became procedural, like this:

Me: Hey, we’d love to have you over for dinner. Are you free Sunday Nov 2? Hosting at ours and ofc bring your kids!

Friend A: No, not then!

Me: No worries, we’ll get you next time! I have Dec 16 or Jan 2?

If a friend was not available, we could look forward and offer them 2–3 more options in the future. Then move to the next person on the list:

Me: Hey, we’d love to have you over for dinner. Are you free Sunday Nov 2? Hosting at ours and ofc bring your kids!

Friend B: Yes! What can we bring?

Crafting easy events

With Schedule Tetris out of the way, I asked myself, what does a great event look like? To me, the characteristics are:

• Intentional guest list, small group

• Opportunity to have interesting, genuine conversation

• Kids are there but not the center of attention

What I wanted was something simple and repeatable. I wanted to replicate the simple and easy grace of the dinner we’d gone to.

Structure

To structure our events, we landed on 4–6 adults, us included. With this size, you can have a shared conversation and there’s less effort to prepare food for a big meal. When it’s larger, I’ve noticed that the group integrity begins to fall apart and there are lots of side conversations. Not what I was designing for. It starts to feel like a party, rather than an intimate gathering.

Our intuition lines up with the book The Art of Gathering, which identifies the ideal group size as 6 for intimacy, 12–15 for a balance of trust and diverse opinion, and 30 for a lively, party-like atmosphere.

Logistics

The next stage was trying to come up with a packaged runbook for the event. Where is it and how do you run it?

One important wrinkle is kids. While I think a restaurant is a fantastic option for adults, having kids in the mix changes everything. At a restaurant, approximately 75% of one parent’s energy and brain power is engaged in feeding the kids and trying to keep them in their seats. This made it a no-brainer to host it at our home, where kids can run around and play with toys.

Then it’s a matter of logistics. In the spirit of the friends who inspired us, we try to keep our events simple. What’s made it easier is repetition; we almost always serve the same menu every time.

A day or two before the event, I place a grocery order based on the menu.

Example menu: Crackers, fruit, veggies for appetizers. Serious Eats’ halal-cart style chicken, rice, and a quick salad for main. For kids, we always boil pasta and offer it with marinara or parmesan. Dessert is whatever’s available, or popsicles from the freezer.

Day of the event, we do some prep in the morning. We tidy the house and prep the meal. Breakables and special items get put away. This part is definitely real work, and does take time. After that, with everything prepared, we host our friends!

One year and 20+ Sunday Suppers later

Since September, we’ve hosted over twenty Sunday Suppers. The repetition has reduced the friction, as we’ve streamlined the same preparation, menu, and steps.

Reflecting back, I don’t think logistics was ever the problem. It was in realizing that I had some control over the situation. I perceived Schedule Tetris to be so much friction that I was more reluctant to reach out, and more reactive about how we spent our times. Structuring Sunday Suppers gave us more control. We say no to more birthday parties now, and see close friends more frequently. And we’ve gotten the opportunity to know people who were friendly acquaintances much better as friends, including one memorable dinner where my husband invited an Internet friend he’d met off X to meet in real life.

The system isn’t perfect. The house prep can be a lot of work. Sometimes we get over our skis on the schedule, and it feels like a burden rather than an exciting event. More times than not, it’s been worth it.

The underlying principle works: systematic beats ad-hoc. Instead of individually scheduling each hangout with heroic effort, this is a system that facilitates spending my time the way I want. Whether that’s a standing Sunday dinner, a monthly walk, or a rotating restaurant reservation, the format matters less than the intention.

If you’re feeling stuck the way I was, scheduled and surrounded by people but feeling alone, maybe this is your inspiration to build your own system.