Mid-century Americans knew how to throw a party, for better or worse. In some of the most famous titles of the 1950s and 1960s—Couples, by John Updike; Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee; Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates—the drama (and martini-soaked melodrama) took place in middle-class living rooms. The stories were fictional, but the setting was realistic.

Until 1975, half of Americans said they entertained guests at their home every month. But then something changed. Americans stopped throwing parties. Even more fundamentally, they stopped visiting each other. Between 1975 and 1998, the share of Americans who gave or attended a monthly dinner party declined by half. The share of Americans saying they never entertained people at home tripled.

In his 2000 book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam wrote that if these trends continued, the ancient practice of visiting with friends 'might entirely disappear from American life in less than a generation.' Well, check your calendars. One generation and change later, Putnam's prediction needs an update.

Combining the two surveys, we get this astonishing fact: The share of Americans who say they host friends or family at their home at least monthly has fallen from 42 percent in 1975 to 12 percent in 2026—a 70 percent collapse in a half-century. Overall face-to-face socializing has declined significantly in the last few decades, and the practice of entertaining friends has not simply moved outside the home, but seems to be vanishing entirely.