[tylertyler]

I have some pretty hard stats on this because I'm a long time employee of PaperlessPost.com an online event invitation company. You are correct that the number of parties is generally influenced by seasonal and life arch trends, social spheres and what is happening in the world.

Generally from what we see, most parties happen because of significant events in peoples lives. A 50th birthday party usually seems important enough for most people to want to attend.

Yes COVID did halt most of this but from what we've seen the numbers came back to 2019 levels early last year.

It could be your friend circles but I wouldn't stop trying to host parties or encouraging your friends from having parties themselves. We all have more responsibilities later in life that make it harder for everyone to show up so I wouldn't take this personally.

I might suggest having a reoccurring party. My neighbor has an Oktoberfest party every year. If people miss out one year they often feel pressured into coming next year, it becomes an event that people look forward to and even offer to help coordinate if it happens on a normal cadence.

[yafbum]

Thanks for sharing insights from data! If you guys publish more stats somewhere, I'd be very interested in reading more. Sounds like you're sitting on a gold mine of firsthand social science data (sizes of events, rsvp latencies, types of events, etc)