It’s difficult to judge as the last 18 months have been pretty much party-less for many of us. In my 20s, I used to freak out at not having Saturday night plans. Now, I can enjoy it. But I would say that the parties I attend are more diverse now and perhaps less stupid, unless they involve some of my family members who are still re-living their post high-school party scenes every week.
Some parties I go to are rather formal, usually celebrating something. Others are pretty much like BYOE picnics such as family gatherings, volunteer organization get-togethers, or friend in town for a visit. Retirement parties are popping up. Very few are keggers any more. Keggers ruled in my youth. Now, we’re more likely to drink fancier items (including fancy beers), serve fancier food (yay!), and listen to more varied music.
Last few parties I went to, they had a much loved film or two running with the sound turned low, so people could watch the good parts. A board game, like Catan. Lots of food and drink. Sometimes music.
SCA parties are music, singing, dancing, and lots of drinking around a fire. Sex is certainly possible. No orgies.
Oh yeah-
I went to a orgy/sex party in my youth, it really wasn’t all that great of a time. I am glad I went - for the experience.
There are drugs and orgy parties for people over 30?!
Why did nobody tell me this? I’ve been going to all the wrong parties!
Words can not describe how frustrated I am that all I’ve been doing is eating frilly and frou-frou fingerfoods and drinking spendy swill and hobnobbing with celebrities and getting nothing else out of it.
Well, the last party I was at was thrown by our neighbors last weekend. Basically a bunch of adult couples in the neighborhood mostly ranging from late 30s to mid 50s with a few older outliers. Mostly we hung out in around their backyard firepit, drinking, making smores, and talking about random shit.
About two years ago, one of my friends turned 40. He flew back to New York to organize a three-day celebratory bender covering Hoboken, NJ, Manhattan, and Brooklyn (all the places he lived when he was in his 20s and early 30s).
One couple I’m friends with (about the same age -late 40s / 50) used to throw like a dozen parties a year at their Manhattan penthouse. Mostly just a bunch of adults standing around, drinking, eating, talking, etc.
My parents (later just my dad after my mom passed away) has been throwing the same night before X-mas party since I was in elementary school (probably 40 years). He only really stopped because of COVID.
I mean, the OP asks a strange question. Is there a particular age where one stops wanting to hang out with a bunch of friends eating, drinking, and shooting the shit?
For neighborhood/work parties, I mostly look at my watch. Waiting for a lull in the conversation to give my wife the “can we go now?” look. I’m not anti-social, I just can only take so much of other people. I like my neighbors and co-workers. I just don’t need to party with them.
It’s been awhile since my debauche friends from college have gotten together.
Last party I went to before the world ended had loud punk rock bands playing, good and cheap booze, good and iffy potluck food, pot, cops called at some point and a guy half my age offered to hump my leg.
Nowadays, we hang around outside with recorded music and nobody passes joints around. I don’t think that will ever come back, but everyone came with their own pipes, so accommodations can be made. No further offers of leg humping have happened, but social distancing makes such things difficult.
I honestly find parties boring as all get-out and avoid them like the plague. So if I find myself at one, what I “do” is keep thinking of ways to escape, timing it to where the fewest notice me leave.
Back in the day, parties were great. Get wasted and wake up the next day still slumped over in the host’s beanbag chair. But there comes a point where you just cannot do that anymore, and parties then go downhill.
Yeah, the age where the friends you would want to hang out with are scattered all over North America, and such new friends as you’ve made since hang out in different circles.
Seriously, I can’t remember when I last was at a non-family party.
To me, it seems like partying to just party seems to die off. You can just have regular gettogethers instead. You have a lot more parties for a reason, and then what you do depends on that reason.
For example, for a Fourth of July party, we ate grilled foods, mess with fireworks, listened to music, and chatted. For Christmas, we ate Christmas foods, opened presents, and chatted. For thanksgiving, we just ate Thanksgiving foods and chatted. We’re considering board game parties, where we’ll eat regular food, play board games, and chat. I assume you can figure out what we do on birthday parties or Super Bowl parties.
You could always throw in other fun activities. The main difference seems that athleticism reduces, and we don’t assume that partying means drinking to excess, as it’s just not worth it after 30, if it ever was.
(I admit I never attended drinking parties myself, but it was what I would think the generic term “party” would mean without qualifiers back when I was younger. That’s what they were in high school and college, anyways.)
These parties sound too much like high school reunions. I went to two of those (reunions) and was bored to death. Even when I was young, I was lukewarm about ‘parties’ (I was fearful of getting in trouble, for various reasons)… Most of my friends and relatives now are dead, moved ‘down south’, are disabled, retired, traveling, and have their own shit going on. The ones still alive can call me on the phone now and then. I don’t leave the house for a ‘party’ any more unless I’m invited out to dinner, I find talking to the same old faces dull. I’m certainly not looking to get loaded or meet Mr. Right. (who is looking for a nurse or a purse)
You might be joking, but my wife and I stopped going to most parties in late 30’s because someone ALWAYS seemed to hit on my wife. Thankfully I was still in pretty good shape back then but…it gets very old. Tbf, my wife was hot…and still is
That was my hope about the last one I went to, a backyard party. Invited by someone I used to work with but has since retired, with a few other ex-coworkers as well. Well, either I changed or they changed, but apparently the gulf between us became very very wide over the past few years. All he and his current friends wanted to talk about was guns, politics, and in general just being sneering curmudgeons and generational chauvinists of the vilest sort.
I could’ve been chilling in my air conditioned house doing whatever, but no, I had to socialize and “catch up”.
