Remember the good old days of sitting around on the couch with your friends, sharing a few laughs and a few more pizzas? Yeah, well those days are over, apparently.
According to Tatler, big, fancy dinner parties are making a comeback. But before you dust off your pearls, you should know they come with a few rules. Ridiculous rules, if you want our honest opinion.
“It’s as glamorous as sitting around a table at home gets,” they wrote. Right-o.
Speaking of sitting, you might want to get comfortable for this next part, because they’ve come up with a few buzzkill hoity-toity guidelines for throwing the ultimate dinner party. We can’t decide if this is a dinner party or a trip to North Korea. If this isn’t a surefire way to ruin everybody’s evening, we don’t know what is…
The 12 dinner party rules we had no idea existed
1. You cannot invite anyone via a group message, because you want to surprise everyone with who the other guests are. So, go ahead and invite your best friend and her crappy ex-boyfriend. It’ll be fun! Also, no cancellations, ever. So, if you’ve already RSVP’d yes, well, sucked in.
2. There should be no less than eight people, and definitely no children, otherwise they’ll all be shipped off to boarding school in the Swiss Alps or something. Also, “not all should be friends – too predictable. No spice. And not all should be strangers – too corporate.”
3. Dress up. That means heels with a cocktail dress for the ladies and “some kind of jacket” for the fellas. Obviously. “It heightens everything… pleasingly.”
4. No latecomers. And no one should leave before 11pm, so make sure you barricade the doors and windows so no one can escape. Also, arrivals should be at “8 for 8.30pm, with dinner being served at 8.45. Serving the food later than 9pm is unacceptable.”
The Mamamia Out Loud team call BS on every single one of these dinner party rules. Post continues after.
5. You should never ask a woman to take off her high heels, even if you have polished floorboards, because “it will ruin her outfit and her night”. Also, you should ostracise anyone who asks what someone’s job is. Those people should definitely be forced to eat outside, separate from the rest of the group.
Top Comments
I mean, these are the rules from Tatler, the magazine for middle class people who want to pretend they're toffs. Advice to be taken with a huge grain of salt. Genuine question, does anyone here do dinner parties like this? We usually do get-togethers with our group and get takeaways or do a pot-luck kind of thing (or a bbq).
Shaky attempt at satire. If you strip away the commentary you've added, many of those rules are perfectly logical and not unreasonable at all (except, perhaps, to people who don't have social manners?).