The Dinner Party
Tom has a solution to the male loneliness epidemic. His wife Linda isn't so sure.
So Tom’s reading this article on his phone Tuesday morning—The Male Loneliness Epidemic: Why Modern Men Are Struggling to Connect—and he’s nodding along like it’s the first smart thing anybody ever wrote. Linda’s loading the dishwasher behind him, which she does every morning after he leaves his coffee cup on the counter, and she can hear him making those little “mm-hmm” sounds he makes when he thinks he’s discovered something important about himself.
“Listen to this,” he says, not turning around. “‘Men today report feeling more isolated than ever, despite being more connected digitally.’ That’s exactly what I’ve been feeling.”
Linda closes the dishwasher harder than necessary. “When do you feel isolated?”
“I don’t know. Generally. Like, when’s the last time I hung out with Jake? Or Mike? We used to be tight in college.”
“You text them all the time.”
“That’s not the same thing.” Tom scrolls down, still not looking at her. “It says here that men need to make more effort to maintain in-person friendships. We’re losing the art of real connection.”
Linda wipes the counter around his elbow. Twenty-three years they’ve been together, married for fifteen, and she’s never heard him use the phrase “real connection” before today. But okay.
“You know what?” Tom puts down his phone with the decisiveness of a man who’s just solved a puzzle. “I’m gonna call Jake and Mike. Maybe Danny too. We should all get together.”
“That sounds nice.”
“Yeah, like a dinner party or something. This Saturday. Can you throw something together?”
And there it is. Can you throw something together. Like dinner parties throw themselves together. Like eight guys and their various dietary restrictions and drinking preferences and the careful social calculus of who sits next to whom just assembles itself while Linda’s at work teaching fourth grade.
“Sure,” she says, because what else is she gonna say? That throwing something together means planning a menu and shopping and cleaning the house and cooking for ten hours and making sure there’s enough chairs and figuring out parking and hoping nobody brings up politics or their ex-wives or that thing that happened at Danny’s wedding three years ago?
“You’re amazing,” Tom says, finally looking at her. “What would I do without you?”
She’s wondering that herself.
Wednesday she makes lists. Thursday she shops—Whole Foods for the good cheese, Costco for the beer, the Jewish deli on 14th Street for the rugelach because Tom’s friends always expect something sweet and she learned years ago that store-bought cookies make her look like she doesn’t care. Friday she cleans the house like company’s coming, which it is, even though Tom doesn’t seem to notice their place needed cleaning.
Saturday morning he asks what he can do to help.
“Just stay out of the kitchen,” she tells him, which is what she always tells him, and he always looks a little hurt, like he really wanted to help but she won’t let him. The truth is he’d help by making everything take twice as long and asking where they keep things that have been in the same cabinet for fifteen years.
By five o’clock she’s got brisket in the oven, potato kugel keeping warm, salad prepped, wine opened to breathe. Tom’s in the shower, probably taking his time because he knows she’s got everything handled.
Jake arrives first, with his new girlfriend whose name Linda wrote down but already forgot. Then Mike with a bottle of wine that costs more than their electric bill, and Danny with his wife Susan, who immediately offers to help but in that way that means she’s really asking what Linda did so she can compliment it.
“Everything smells incredible,” Susan says. “You’re so talented.”
“It’s just brisket,” Linda says, which is technically true but doesn’t mention the marinade she started Tuesday night or the special potatoes or the homemade horseradish.
Tom appears in the living room like he’s the host of a talk show, all fresh-showered and charming, asking everyone what they’re drinking and telling stories about work that Linda’s heard six times but that are new to everybody else. The guys laugh in that hearty way men laugh when they’re remembering why they used to be friends.
Linda floats between kitchen and living room, refilling drinks and bringing out appetizers and making sure the conversation keeps moving. She’s good at this. Has to be. Twenty-three years of practice reading the room, knowing when to interrupt a conversation that’s going nowhere and when to let people talk themselves into having a good time.
During dinner, they’re all having such a blast. College stories, work complaints, that safe kind of nostalgia that makes everyone feel young and important. Tom’s holding court at the head of their dining room table, gesturing with his fork, and Linda thinks maybe this was a good idea after all. Look how happy he looks. Look how easy this is for him.
“Remember when we drove to Atlantic City junior year?” Jake’s saying. “And Tom convinced that bouncer he was Danny’s older brother?”
“You idiots nearly got us arrested,” Danny’s wife says, but she’s laughing.
“Worth it though,” Mike says. “Best weekend ever.”
Linda clears plates and brings out dessert and coffee, and nobody really notices she’s gone except to praise the rugelach when she comes back. Which is fine. This is how these things work.
After dinner the guys migrate to the living room with their beers, and Linda starts the cleanup with Susan, who insists on helping even though Linda would rather do it herself because then it gets done right.
“Tom’s such a great host,” Susan says, scraping plates. “He just has this way of making everyone feel welcome.”
“Mm-hmm,” Linda says.
“And your place always feels so homey. Like, you walk in and you just feel comfortable, you know? It’s a real gift.”
Linda’s loading the dishwasher, listening to the guys laugh about something in the other room, and she wonders what Susan thinks creates that homey feeling. The throw pillows that arrange themselves? The good soap in the guest bathroom that appears by magic? The way the temperature’s always perfect and there’s always enough food and the right music playing at the right volume?
“Thanks,” she says.
Later, after everyone leaves and Linda’s finishing the last of the dishes, Tom comes into the kitchen with two wine glasses and the dregs of a bottle.
“That was perfect,” he says. “Exactly what I needed.”
“Good,” she says, because it’s true enough. He seems lighter, more like his old self.
“Jake said something funny when they were leaving. He said you ‘really know how to make a house feel like home.’ Isn’t that nice?”
Linda stops scrubbing the roasting pan. “Yeah. Nice.”
“I mean, it’s true though. You do. I don’t know how you do it, but you do.”
She turns around to look at him. He’s leaning against the counter, relaxed and grateful and completely oblivious. Tom the Great Host, as Jake called him. Tom who solved his loneliness problem with one phone call and one dinner party that materialized like a magic trick.
“Tom,” she says.
“What?”
“When you were feeling lonely—before tonight—what did that feel like?”
He thinks about it, swirling wine in his glass. “I don’t know. Like I was just going through the motions, you know? Work, home, work, home. Like I wasn’t really connecting with anybody.”
“But you were connecting with me.”
“Well, yeah, but—” He stops. “I mean, that’s different. You’re my wife.”
“Right.”
“I meant like, guy friends. People I could talk to about guy stuff.”
“What kind of guy stuff?”
“I don’t know. Work frustrations. Sports. Just… I don’t know. Guy stuff.”
Linda turns back to the sink. She’s thinking about all the work frustrations he’s talked through with her over the years, all the weekend games they’ve watched together, all the guy stuff she’s listened to and responded to and helped him figure out. She’s thinking about Jake’s girlfriend, whose name she still can’t remember, and how she spent the whole evening making sure that girl felt included even though she clearly didn’t want to be there. She’s thinking about Susan saying Tom’s such a great host, and wondering if Susan knows that being a great host requires someone else to do all the hosting.
“I’m glad you had fun,” she says.
“We should do it again soon. Maybe monthly? Like a regular thing.”
“Maybe.”
Tom finishes his wine and rinses the glass, which is more than he usually does. “I’m gonna go watch the news. You coming?”
“In a minute.”
He kisses the top of her head on his way out, and Linda stands there in her kitchen, looking at the last few items that need to be put away. The fancy cloth napkins she ironed this afternoon. The serving dishes she only uses for company. The good silverware that somehow never makes it back to the dining room on its own.
She can hear the TV in the other room, Tom scrolling through channels, probably looking for SportsCenter. In a few minutes he’ll call out to ask if she knows where the remote is, or whether they have any of those crackers he likes, and she’ll stop what she’s doing to help him find whatever he’s looking for.
The male loneliness epidemic. She thinks about that phrase, rolling it around in her mouth like a word in a foreign language. As if connection were something you could order up like Chinese takeout, instead of something you had to tend to every single day like a garden that would die without constant attention.
Linda wipes down the counter one last time and turns off the kitchen light. Tomorrow Tom will probably text Jake about when they should do this again, and Jake will text back something like “Linda’s amazing,” and Tom will feel good about himself for having such great friends and such a great wife who makes such great dinner parties happen.
And Linda will be glad he’s happy. She will. Because that’s what twenty-three years of marriage looks like. Being glad when your husband discovers he’s not lonely because you’ve spent two decades making sure he never had to be.
“Linda?” Tom calls from the living room. “Do we have any more of that cheese?”
“I’ll get it,” she calls back, because of course she will.
Author’s Notes
I wrote this story after reading about the so-called “male loneliness epidemic” in approximately forty-seven different articles, all of which seemed to discover male isolation as if it were a new continent. What struck me wasn't that men are uniquely lonely—loneliness is the human condition, after all—but that this particular kind of loneliness was being treated as newsworthy while women's isolation, women's emotional labor, women's management of everyone else's social lives remained invisible.
Additionally, I wanted to write about the gap between how we experience care and how we recognize it. Tom genuinely feels lonely, and the dinner party genuinely helps him feel connected. But he can't see that his connection depends entirely on Linda's silent work: the planning, the emotional labor, the social architecture she builds around his needs, and yes, the mental load. He experiences the solution without seeing the solver.
This is domestic realism as political fiction. The personal is political, as we used to say, and nowhere is that more true than in a marriage where one person's loneliness gets a diagnosis and a solution while the other person's work remains unnamed and unrecognized. While this isn’t me drawing from my own personal experience, I do think all of us can relate to this type of imbalance, at least to some extent. Which side of it you’re on is something you have to figure out yourself.
The ending isn't meant to be hopeful or hopeless, just true. Linda will get the cheese because that's what she does. Tom will feel grateful and connected because that's what Linda makes possible. And tomorrow they'll both wake up in the same house, in the same marriage, with the same understanding of who does what to keep their life feeling like a life worth living.