8 min
Retirees: The Dinner Party Needs Us
My dog Dottie is the best dinner guest I have ever had. She shows up early, eats whatever lands on the floor and has never once asked whether the gravy is gluten-free. She has also never cancelled by text eight minutes before the roast came out of the oven, which is more than I can say for a few of my two-legged friends. Lately I suspect a dog with no table manners is the only regular dinner guest a lot of people my age have left. I read two articles in the Toronto Star recently that backed up my suspicion. Both explored the slow death of the dinner party and, more troubling, the gradual disappearance of socializing from our lives. We’re inviting fewer people into our homes, going out less, joining fewer clubs and spending more evenings alone. Journalist Derek Thompson, digging through decades of lifestyle surveys, found that the share of adults who regularly have a friend over has dropped 70 per cent since 1975. Back then, 42 per cent of people hosted friends or family at least once a month. Today it’s 12 per cent. Somewhere between the TV remote and the self-checkout, we got remarkably good at entertaining ourselves without the inconvenience of involving other human beings. I could blame Netflix, social media, the price of a pound of butter or the sheer exhaustion of planning a menu for someone who doesn’t eat gluten, dairy, carbohydrates or anything that once had a mother. All of them are guilty. For those of us in the retirement chapter, though, something more serious is going on. We’re slowly losing the habit of being together, and for seniors that habit holds up a lot of the house. Unlike an RRSP, friendships don’t grow when you leave them alone. Loneliness Moves In Without Calling First One of the great ironies of retirement is that we spend forty years dreaming about having more time, then discover that time with nobody to share it goes stale faster than an open bag of chips. At work, people come at you whether you like it or not. There are colleagues, customers, office birthdays, the Tuesday meeting that could have been an email and the office character who makes you question the entire hiring process. We grumble about the interruptions, yet they hand us connection, belonging, someone who notices when we don’t show up and a reason to put on real pants. Some of those friendships survive retirement. Plenty of others turn out to have been built around the coffee machine, and they quietly fade the day we hand in our security passes. Then retirement arrives and the whole social scaffolding comes down over a long weekend. The first few months feel glorious. No alarm, no commute, no Tuesday meeting. Just you, your coffee and the delicious freedom of doing absolutely nothing. After more than twenty-five years in banking, I had earned the right to sit quietly without somebody asking me for a sales forecast. Solitude like that is a treat, and the trouble starts when the treat becomes the whole menu. It happens so gradually we barely notice. We skip one invitation because we’re tired and stop hosting because it’s too much work. We promise to call an old friend next week, next week turns into next month, and before long our social calendar has all the excitement of a dentist’s waiting room. Being alone and being lonely are two different animals. Plenty of people who live by themselves have full, noisy lives, and plenty of married couples eat dinner in silence across the same table. Loneliness is the distance between the connection you have and the connection you want, and that distance has a way of widening while we’re busy telling everyone we’re fine. Your Heart Is Keeping Score The consequences go well past having no one to dissect the latest episode of Slow Horses with. Research has linked chronic loneliness and social isolation to higher rates of heart disease, depression, cognitive decline and early death. The U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory on loneliness found that poor social connection carries a 29 per cent higher risk of heart disease and a 32 per cent higher risk of stroke. Those are cholesterol-sized numbers, and I have yet to meet a doctor who writes a prescription for Thursday night euchre. We fuss over our blood pressure, bone density and protein intake. We count steps, lift weights, swallow supplements the size of a hockey puck and show up dutifully for every appointment. Friendship rarely makes the checklist. I teach three fitness classes a week, and I’ve learned the squats are only part of what people come for. Some of my regulars arrive early just to chat. They notice when someone is missing, swap recipes, celebrate birthdays and compare notes on everything from knee replacements to grandchildren. They come for the workout and stay for the friends, the laughing and the gossip by the water fountain, which probably burns a few calories of its own. I’m convinced the ten minutes of chatter before class does as much good as the forty-five minutes of exercise that follow, and nobody has ever pulled a hamstring catching up. For anyone who has lost a spouse, lost some mobility or watched friends move to Kelowna or pass on, those connections matter even more. Isolation is sneaky because it feeds itself. The less we see people, the more awkward it feels to see them, and the couch gets a little comfier every year. Nobody Needs a Charcuterie Board Somewhere along the way, having people over turned into a production requiring a menu plan, a deep clean, three rounds of calendar negotiations and the knife skills of a MasterChef finalist. When did friendship start demanding matching dinnerware and a charcuterie board arranged in the shape of a Christmas tree? Whatever happened to putting on the kettle? I grew up in a time when people dropped by. Sometimes they called first and sometimes they didn’t. There was usually a pot of coffee, a tin of something in the cupboard and enough conversation to fill an afternoon. If the house was a mess, you moved the newspaper off the chair and told them to sit down. Dottie, I’ll point out, has never once inspected my baseboards. She has never critiqued the soup, commented on the throw pillows or asked whether the cheese was locally sourced. She simply shows up delighted, which is the entire job description of a good guest. Meanwhile, our friends are sitting at home in their sweatpants wondering why nobody calls. So invite them over anyway. Serve soup, order pizza or make egg salad sandwiches and leave the crusts on. Better still, tell everyone to bring something and call it a potluck. Years from now, the story everyone retells will be the night the tea came out of Marjorie’s nose and the whole table stayed two hours past dessert. And if anyone judges your housekeeping, hand them the Swiffer on their way out. Somebody Has to Send the First Text One of the most telling points in the Star pieces was that people generally enjoy a get-together once they’re actually there. What they’ve lost is the will to organize one. We’re all standing at the edge of the dance floor waiting for someone else to go first, and at our age that can be a long wait. So go first. Retirement hands most of us more control over our calendars than we had while we were working, raising kids and trying to remember whose turn it was to pick up the dry cleaning. Call a friend and suggest a walk. Invite the neighbour for coffee. Start a monthly potluck, a cribbage night or a standing Friday lunch at the diner where the server already knows your order. Join a book club, volunteer, take a class at the community centre or phone the friend you’ve been meaning to call since the Mulroney years. Mix up the ages, too, and don’t limit your guest list to people who remember when television had three channels. Younger friends bring new energy. We bring experience and, as anyone who has followed my campaign against grandsplaining knows, a supply of unsolicited advice we’d be wise to ration. If we’re honest, they could teach us a thing or two, starting with how to get the TV back to the right input after the grandkids leave. And please stop keeping score. Some people are born organizers. Others are thrilled to show up but couldn’t plan a two-car parade. One friend hosts the dinner, another brings the butter tarts, and someone else remembers every birthday or makes the phone call when life goes sideways. All of it counts. If you’re always the one doing the inviting, congratulations, you’ve found your calling. Keep at it. One Invitation, Two Lives You never really know how lonely someone else might be. The neighbour who waves cheerfully from her driveway may be struggling since her husband died. The friend who keeps saying no may be finding the stairs a little harder every month. The fellow from the gym might go home to a quiet house and not say another word to anyone until his next workout. Sometimes the person who turns you down needs a second invitation, one that makes yes easier. Sometimes we’re the ones waiting for somebody to ask. An invitation costs us one phone call and can make somebody’s whole week. I spent my working life helping people prepare for retirement financially. I’ve just published a whole book on it, Your Retirement Reset, and I’ll keep beating that drum. Even so, a healthy RRSP is cold comfort if your world has shrunk to the size of your living room. That’s why my philosophy has always been Hip, Fit & Financially Free. A good retirement runs on money, movement, purpose, curiosity, laughter and people, with a heavy pour on the people. We need friends who make us laugh, challenge our thinking, drag us out for a walk and occasionally tell us we’re full of beans, and we need to be that friend for somebody else. So here’s your assignment. Before Sunday, invite someone to do something. Coffee, lunch, a walk, a bowl of soup or an afternoon visit all count. It doesn’t need to be elaborate, expensive or even especially well planned. Then do it again next week, and the week after that, until somebody starts inviting you back. We spend years making sure our money will last as long as we do. Our friendships deserve the same attention. If the dinner party really is on life support, I nominate our generation to revive it. We’ve already brought back vinyl records, bell-bottoms and pickleball, so a potluck can’t be that hard. Dottie has kindly volunteered to handle cleanup under the table. Don’t retire... ReWire! And for heaven’s sake, put the kettle on and invite somebody over. Sue Further Reading Bradbury, C. (2026, October 10). The lost supper. Toronto Star. Gurney, M. (2026, October 10). Social isolation is becoming a big problem. The solution may be simpler than you think. Toronto Star. My Book is Available for Order: I hope you will consider ordering a copy of Your Retirement Reset for yourself, a friend, or someone you love. Published by ECW Press and is available through Indigo or Amazon and McNally Robinson. If you like supporting Canadian booksellers, check with your local independent bookstore too. Most can order it.
