The decline of hosting at home

The Guardian - In the US, the number of people who regularly host friends or family fell from 42% in 1975 to 12% in 2026 – a 70% drop over the last 50 years. In the UK, the numbers are not much better: last year, a poll of 2,000 adults found that more than four in 10 British people avoid hosting at home due to the clean-up it requires….

We haven’t always felt this way about having people over. In fact, anthropologist Robin Dunbar, best known for “Dunbar’s number” – a theory that suggests humans can only really maintain about 150 stable social connections at once – believes we would still rather entertain at home given the choice, but circumstances often conspire against it. “One reason is that our social networks may have become more scattered as cities have got larger,” he says. “If we live in smaller villages and towns, it is easy to visit for casual get-togethers. There is a thing called the 30-minute rule: if someone lives more than 30 minutes away, we pretty much stop seeing them regularly. The time/effort required becomes too great.”