This article below made me think about changes to the social landscape over the years. With respect to how adults self segregate I haven’t really seen overt enforced separation as in Mom or Granny kicking the men outside after dinner so she and the womenfolk can have the kitchen to themselves or Dad or Grandpa herding all the men into the den etc. in decades.
I often see some degree of age separation but it’s not rigid. The most obvious separation I see is along lies of shared interests with women with younger children tending to congregate conversationally, men who like to talk sports or cars etc. lumping together. Occasionally at non-family parties young, attractive single women and their besties will hold court for a while men buzz in and out.
How do people naturally separate out or come together at the parties you attend?
If I don’t know anyone I will often glance around for loners like myself and initiate a light conversation to see where it goes. If my girlfriend doesn’t know anyone I will usually intoduce her around especially where I think she might be most comfortable and if she gets a good conversation going I will wander off into groups I know.
I recently went to a party where I didn’t know one single person including the host. It was the Mayweather fight party. Great crowd, I felt like I knew everyone within 5 min of walking in the door.
I think people sort themselves out according to conversational compatibility – looking for people who are decent listeners.
Blowhards and bores tend to drive people away. Very quiet people also aren’t rewarding. Bad listeners – I’m sure you know the type! – aren’t a lot of fun. But if you can get a group of four or five who can bounce the ball around, giving and taking, and keeping the topic interesting – that’s the ideal.
In most of the parties I’ve been to in the last handful of years, I see this pattern:
a) For awhile people mingle and intersperse so as to interact with everyone at the party at least briefly; then
b) Couples (and/or other romantic-attachment patterns that may not precisely be couples) congeal with partners sitting with their partners, and tend to coalesce around people they’re close friends with, with a bit of a daisy-chain effect around the edges.
The latter pattern is almost never sex-segregated; it sometimes ends up age-segregated.
Most of the parties I go to include people the host knows from different aspects of the host’s life, and the party-goers tend to segregate along lines of who already knows each other. But not completely. There are definitely some cross-overs, as the party ebbs and flows.
I don’t see a lot of sex-segregation. I do see the primary hosts hiding in the kitchen to make food happen, though.
That’s true at the bigger parties where not everyone knows each other. At a lot of the ones I’ve been to recently, everyone has known each other for years, so there’s no real segregation- people sort of move around in some kind of party Brownian motion- I usually don’t hang around with my wife at these things, because I see her all the time, and don’t always get to hang around with friends.
I was at one party where these 2 guys were having this extra loud discussion about comic books and since it was in a small area, it sort of dominated everything and everyone else was quiet. Most of us ended up walking outside to the pool.
Those 2 guys spent hours that night talking comic books.
The parties I attend seem to end up with the women with babies/young kids sitting around talking about babies/young kids, the three guys who didn’t vote for Obama discussing amongst themselves how much they hate Obama, and the rest of us outside or in the basement getting high.
Most seem to have fun, talking, drinking and dancing. I’m awkward at parties, so I always end up looking at them, with some other loners occationally coming by playing a game or talking bullshit and getting blind drunk. I prefer smaller gatherings.
When I was growing up our large extended family had regular gatherings. No matter what the occasion, bar mitzvah, shiva, summer garden party, it always ended with the women in the living room and the men off in some other place playing pinochle.
In the meantime, at large parties I have been to, men and women together seem to gather in small knots that break up and re-form. At the small dinner parties we tend to host and go to these days, everyone congregates in the living room until dinner is served and we often don’t leave the dining room. But if we do, we simply revert to the living room.
If I’m not the host, I tend to find a particularly prime location and situate myself there with a few people I know well but haven’t seen for a while. We must look like we’re having fun because people tend to join us for a while then move on, while I mostly stay in the same spot talking to whoever is around at the moment.
I’ve never been to a party that segregates itself by sex or anything else for that matter. I can easily imagine a party like that, but in my imagination it’s stocked with much older more traditional people and I don’t know anyone like that. I go to plenty of parties with a lot of guests 10-20 years older than me (so 40s and 50s) so either it has more to do with being old fashioned than actual age, or men and women don’t have any cooties outbreaks until they’re in their 60s or above.
That is why many houses have “hearth rooms”. Large kitchens/living rooms that have a fireplace and are designed so many people can socialize in the kitchen.
At the parties I usually attend, I am playing Eurogames, usually with mostly men but sometimes one or two other women. My husband chases the kids when he comes. If I attend without him, the children may be on their own, although I try to remind them to eat dinner if they didn’t have it before the party.
I find it interesting, admirable, and annoying all at the same time what the lady in the article did. Indian parties are similarly segregated, though certainly not as tightly as Muslim parties. And I never would have thought of disrupting the status quo. Instead we just kind of sit and wait for the elder generation to die off, while the kids mingle freely. I know that sounds horrible, but I don’t really believe we can change their minds.
My biggest problem at parties is all the mommies ever do is talk about their kids. Which I get it, they are a big part of your lives, so I don’t mind talking about them for a little while, but maybe they could not dominate the whole conversation? In my twenties I spent most of my time with the guys for exactly this reason - the conversation amongst the women were always men, marriage, kids. Complain about your husband, then the next woman complains. Whereas men at least talked about games or movies or whatever.
In my thirties I started finding new friends that are like me, and so now the gatherings I go to are way more intermingled. We don’t talk about kids because most of us don’t have any, and we share a lot more common interests.
I still would never try to sit with the men at my parents’ house, though.
There is often a sub-group of people who know each other outside of the party and stick together talking about and doing the stuff they always do. There also seem to be satellite friends of the hosts at the party, me and my wife fitting in that category, and we’ve been to repeated parties where we’ve become friends with other satellites, meeting only at these parties, sometimes not really knowing each others names. But that reminds me that couples often get together with other couples while the singles group together as well. If there’s an odd person out I try to engage them, I like to meet new people and hear about their lives.
