what to do when you go to a party
It’s Saturday night and the party you’ve been waiting for all week is finally here. As you start to get ready, your mind fills with a stream of questions; you wonder what you should wear, who else is going to be there, and what time you should show up? But in all of the anticipation for a party, few people ever ask the most basic question about parties: why am I going?
Most people assume they go to parties to see their friends, meet new people, celebrate an occasion, or just escape the monotony of life. But if you want to understand why you go to a party, you need to move past these more surface-level reasons and explore the deeper motives of your heart.
why do you go to parties?
At your core, you attend a party for a mix of two main reasons. The first reason people go to parties is to connect with other people. Deep down, every person wants to connect with other people. This is why we spend so much time at parties either talking to our friends or getting to know new people.
Why is connecting with others so important? Because every person is searching for a sense of belonging. We all have a deep fear of being alone and excluded, so we pursue friendships to feel safe, comfortable, and secure.
This is why so many people either show up to a party with their friends or find them the moment they walk through the door. They do everything they can to avoid strangers and other unfamiliar people, unwilling to risk their sense of security and belonging to meet new people. So instead, they spend the night surrounding themselves with people who feel familiar, whether it’s because of shared interests, cultures, or experiences.
The second motive for going to parties, however, is the opposite of the first. We don’t just go to parties to connect with other people, but also to find our place in the group. Everybody wants to see how they measure up against the rest of the people at the party.
This is why so many interactions at parties aren’t so much about connecting with another person, but rather are about standing out from the group. We compete against our peers in different ways to see where we fit on the social hierarchy. We want to be the best looking, the funniest, the richest, the skinniest, the smartest, the coolest, or the most successful, all to stand out from our peers in ways that our local culture finds valuable.
Parties allow us to put our best selves forward and see how we stack up against our peers. After all, you can only know if you’re funny or attractive or clever if you can compare yourself to other people. This explains why we spend so much time, though, and energy getting ready for a party. We know people will be compared and contrasted against other people all night, so we take extra time to make sure we look our absolute best.
Why are we so motivated to stand out from others? Because we are each driven by a deep desire for status. We want to be ranked higher on the ladder of social hierarchy than our peers. We watch how other people with different status levels respond to us to gauge our status, basing our self-worth on their reactions. As Robert Greene wrote:
We humans are very sensitive to our rank and position within any group. We can measure our status by the attention and respect we receive. We are constantly monitoring differences and comparing ourselves with others. But for some people status is more than a way of measuring social position—it is the most important determinant of their self-worth.
This is why every party is full of a thousand little status competitions, whether it’s who pays attention to whom, who gets the most attractive people to talk to them, or who gets accepted into which social circle? We evaluate each other on every little thing, then use this information to determine where we fit into a group. We love these status competitions and often end up rehashing the events of a party the next day with our friends to figure out who won or lost them.
These two motives for going to a party, to feel both a sense of belonging and a sense of status, can’t be separated, though, and turn into one main motive: we try to become friends with the highest-status people possible, hoping that they will help us feel both secure and valuable.
so what’s the problem?
You might be wondering, what’s so wrong with wanting security or status from a party? While there is nothing inherently bad about security or status, problems occur because of these motives because of our ultimate desire at a party. We will do whatever it takes to both increase our sense of safety and status.
This causes us to see other people instrumentally, as a means to help us reach our goal of high-status friends who make us feel comfortable. We use other people to benefit ourselves and ignore or discard anyone who can’t be used to help us reach our goals.
When we go to parties driven by these motives, we evaluate everyone there by subconsciously asking, “What can this person do for me?” We instantly judge everyone at the party based on our cultural stereotypes, deciding which people can help us most. We make split-second decisions based on their clothes, body type, skin color, and much more.
If we believe that another person can help us feel more comfortable and increase our status, then we’ll interact with them and try to become their friend. But if we don’t think they’ll help us reach our goals, then we’ll ignore them and exclude them from our circles.
I’ve seen this happen so much at parties and I’m sure you have, too. People are incredibly friendly towards any high-status person but act as if any lower-status person is invisible. They have no use for them, so they make it clear through both verbal and nonverbal cues that they aren’t welcomed.
If you don’t believe me, then watch how people treat those with special needs. My sister has special needs, and everywhere she goes, even among Christians, she gets ignored. Why? Because special needs people have nothing to offer the typical person; they won’t help you feel either more comfortable or help to increase your status.
That’s the way that our world works: everyone evaluates and uses other people for what they can offer you. We try to befriend and spend time with people who can help us feel comfortable and popular but exclude and ignore anyone who doesn’t have anything to offer to us.
Jesus’ thoughts on our motives
This kind of behavior isn’t anything new, though, it was just as common in Jesus’ day. At a dinner party hosted by a leader of the Pharisees in Luke 14, Jesus observed the guests as they filtered into the party. As the guests were gathered around the table, Jesus used a parable to call out the guests’ behavior:
When Jesus noticed how the guests picked the places of honor at the table, he told them this parable: “When someone invites you to a wedding feast, do not take the place of honor, for a person more distinguished than you may have been invited. If so, the host who invited both of you will come and say to you, ‘Give this person your seat.’ Then, humiliated, you will have to take the least important place.
But when you are invited, take the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he will say to you, ‘Friend, move up to a better place.’ Then you will be honored in the presence of all the other guests. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”
Jesus noticed that the other guests at the party were doing everything that they could to sit in the places of honor. They wanted to become friends with the highest-status people they possibly could, hoping that these relationships would help improve their lives.
Why were these places of honor so important? They are how they would create security and status in Jesus' culture. If you could sit by the host, then you could build helpful friendships that would make you comfortable, popular and all-around success.
Through this parable, Jesus forced the guests to confront their motives for why they chose where to sit. Jesus saw that they only loved and cared about themselves. They’d do whatever it took to advance their interests and only saw other people as instruments toward their own goals. Later, Jesus warned his disciples to avoid people who were only out for their comfort and status:
Beware of the teachers of the law. They like to walk around in flowing robes and love to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces and have the most important seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at banquets. They devour widows’ houses and for a show make lengthy prayers.
These people were only motivated by their interests and would use the people on the edges to enrich themselves and satisfy their selfish ambitions.
While our parties look quite different than the ones Jesus was at, our hearts are the same: we idolize the places of honor and will do whatever it takes to get to them. C.S. Lewis wrote about these desires in an essay called “The Inner Ring.” He wrote:
I believe that in all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside.
He goes on to say:
This desire is one of the great permanent mainsprings of human action. It is one of the factors which go to make up the world as we know it—this whole pell-mell of struggle, competition, confusion, graft, disappointment and advertisement.
Lewis wants us to see how deeply we are driven by the desire to become an insider, all in the hope that it will give us the sense of security and status that we so badly want. We struggle and fight and compete for these spots on the inside, afraid that our lives will be meaningless if we get left out.
This desire for the inner ring causes us to do all kinds of evil things to try to get inside of it. As Lewis says:
Of all the passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.
When parties are filled with a spirit of selfish ambition and self-promotion, we’ll do whatever it takes to secure our spot in the inner ring, causing them to become toxic places where jealousy, envy, and conflict thrive. Parties become filled with social games, cutting remarks, backhanded putdowns, and unspoken status battles. We’ll tear other people down, insult them, reject them, ignore them, and more, all to help us reach our selfish goals for the party.
so how should you act at a party?
If you want to change how you act at parties, then you need to completely flip your prevailing around. When you go to parties you shouldn’t ask, “Who can help me get what I want?”, but should instead ask, “Who here could use a friend?” Instead of evaluating other people for how well they could meet your needs, look for people whose needs you could help meet.
The best way to find these people is to just look around. Who is standing on the edges? Who is all alone? Who is being ignored? Who has nothing valuable (in the eyes of the world) to offer the insiders? Find the person standing all by themselves and go over and say hello.
When you ask “Who here could use a friend?”, your whole approach to parties gets reversed. You’re no longer looking at people as instruments to help you get what you want, but rather are seeking to love and serve them because of their inherent worth and value. Human beings don’t gain their worth from their athleticism, looks, or job, but rather because they are made in God’s image. Because of this, every person at a party is equally valuable, no matter where they fall on our society’s social hierarchy.
This is a central message throughout the Bible. God is always commanding us to remember the outsider, the foreigner, and the person who doesn’t fit in. We see this in Leviticus when God tells the Israelites:
You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.
Why are the Israelites to love the stranger as themselves? Because they know what it's like to be on the outside. Too many people, Christians included, quickly forget what it’s like to be on the outside and live their lives doing everything they can to avoid the stranger. They surround themselves in their comfortable and high-status circles, rejecting everyone different from them.
Jesus shows us what it looks like to love the stranger as ourselves. He spent so much of his time on earth loving and serving the people on the edges that society had rejected and forgotten. He never judged people based on the status hierarchies of his day but found ways to befriend the poor, the outcasts, the crippled, the lepers, and the nobodies, all because he loved them and saw them as precious in God’s sight.
Jesus calls us to do the same, to humble ourselves and love other people, as we consider them better and more important than ourselves. All of the Pharisees at the banquet wanted to be exalted, but it was Jesus, the one who humbled himself by washing his disciples’ feet and loving the people on the edges who ultimately was exalted by God.
where do we get the power to welcome others?
So where do we get the power to love people not for what they can do for us, but rather because they are worthy of love in and of themselves? From Jesus, who left his place in the ultimate inner circle, the Trinity, to come to earth and bring all of us as outsiders into friendship with God.
When humanity fell into sin, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit could have forgotten about us and continued to enjoy their eternal friendship in heaven. But God chose to love us and save us not because of what we can give to him, but just because he loves us and wants us as friends. We are the object of his love, not an instrument for his self-love.
Because of this love, Jesus chose to be excluded from the greatest friend group that has ever existed, the Trinity, so that we could be welcomed in and included for all of eternity. Jesus could have stayed in heaven and lived a safe and high-status life, but instead, he came to earth and became the ultimate outsider, ridiculed and mocked by the people he came to save before being rejected on the cross by God the Father.
Because of what Jesus has done for us, we can find our need for security and status met through God’s love for us. We are a part of God’s eternal friendship circle, giving us ultimate security and status. Now, because we are satiated by God, we can go to the edges of our circles and love people there, even if they never promise to give us anything in return.
When you let this sink into your heart then it allows you to go to a party with a completely different frame of reference. You no longer need to use other people to help you get what you want, but you can love others and express the love of God that you have experienced to others. That type of attitude will completely remake a party, changing it from a self-interested, cliquish environment to one where everyone is welcomed and valued.
