Approximately five million years ago, I interviewed a Philadelphia writer named Sarah Grey about her family’s weekly Friday Night Meatballs ritual, for Real Simple Magazine. My piece has vanished off the Internet but here is Sarah’s original essay about the concept, which went viral back in 2014. The premise is incredibly simple: Sarah and her family invited friends over every week for spaghetti and meatballs on Friday night. That’s it. But it is, of course, also so much more! Sarah was an expert in the art of “deep casual hosting,” a term Katherine Goldstein coined recently, to describe the kind of bonding social experience so many of us crave:
In this method of hosting, you are going casual on the surface, so you can go deeper with your connections and relationships by regularly gathering in a more relaxed setting. Think of this as “having someone over for supper.” It is the opposite of elaborate, memorable dinner parties, the supposed hot trend of 2024/25. In a society that demands SO much from us, we can only pull off regular hosting if we set realistic standards. I want your dinner (brunch, lunch, campfire weenie roast, etc.) gathering to feel totally doable for you, and not require much (or any) more than you’d do for yourself or your family WITHOUT guests.
I loved Sarah’s idea so much that I wrote a magazine feature about it. But I immediately dismissed Friday Night Meatballs as something I could never do. I’m an introvert who can be a little socially anxious on a good day. At the time, I had just had a baby. I was struggling intensely with postpartum anxiety and was just generally in survival mode for so many reasons. I remember floating the idea to my then-husband and him just sort of staring at me blankly. I say that without criticism; we had left the city a few years back and didn’t yet have a close circle of friends or strong sense of community in our new area. It was a time when we desperately needed a village but hadn’t really coalesced one locally.
But there was another reason why I thought “deep casual hosting” was not for me: My perfectionism.
