I hosted a dinner party every Saturday in 2025. My husband and I made new friends, ate good food, and got the kids to bed on time.

• Amanda Litman and her husband, who have two young kids, were feeling socially isolated.
• They decided to host a dinner party in their two-bedroom apartment every Saturday in 2025.
• Litman said she got to have a social life every week and will carry on hosting through 2026.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Amanda Litman, 35, who lives in New York City. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

In December 2024, my husband and I had a three-month-old and two-year-old daughter, and we felt lonely and isolated. Having kids is magical, but it's a lot.

Over the first couple of years of parenthood, we realized that it was really hard to make plans and find time to have conversations with grown-ups. We used to joke that everyone was lonely, but no one could hang out.

You can chat to other parents at the playground or see them at pickup, but after having kids, you lose the spontaneity of being able to go to the movies or out to dinner, or to a party at the drop of a hat. Things become logistically difficult. We would always question, "Is the thing we're invited to worth whatever it will cost us to go, plus $150 for a babysitter?"

We wanted to create some kind of social anchor in our lives, and my husband suggested that we set a New Year's resolution to host people for dinner every Saturday in 2025.

At first, I was like, "I think you're insane. That's a stupid thing to do." But he's the cook in our family, not me, so I agreed.

We made a list of everyone we know, or would like to know, or could possibly plausibly invite, used a spreadsheet as a schedule, and started texting people.

We'd say, "Hey, we have a resolution to host people at our house every Saturday. Do you want to come over for dinner X, Y, or Z weekend at five o'clock? Bring the kids!" And as people would say yes, we would go back and forth with scheduling, and put them on the calendar.

We often thought about canceling, but felt glad we didn't

We live in a two-bedroom apartment in New York City, so we tried to keep the dinner parties relatively contained. Our table can fit up to six people at a stretch, but we also sat on the floor, we ate on our couch, and the kids would climb all over the place.

Most of the time, we'd host between one and three families. Our biggest party had 15 guests (11 adults and four kids), and our smallest had one.

We had a mix of really longtime friends, new friends, and people we'd never spoken to for more than 20 minutes. Sometimes people knew each other and other times the guests had never met, so we got the chance to help new people connect.

After a few weeks, we got into a pretty good rhythm. On Monday, I would message whoever was scheduled for that Saturday, confirming dinner and asking if they had any dietary restrictions.

My husband used that to figure out what to cook. He likes the opportunity to make something ambitious. Some of my favorites were his Gochujang caramel cookies, lemon bars, lasagna, and fried chicken.

He would go to the grocery store, then cook a little bit on Thursday night or bake if he was making dessert or bread. He would do a little bit more on Friday night after the girls went to bed, and more on Saturday morning while we fussed around the house and the kids played. When the kids napped, between 1 and 4 p.m-ish, he would finish cooking.

People would come over at 5 p.m. and leave around 7 p.m., sometimes 9 p.m., and occasionally 10 p.m. We're 35-year-olds with kids, so it didn't go on until 2 a.m.

Every Saturday around 3 p.m., when my husband was in the weeds of cooking, worrying about not finishing in time, and the kids were misbehaving, we'd be like, "Should we just cancel?" But we never did.

We felt almost compulsive about keeping our streak alive, and by the end of the evening, we were always glad to have hosted.

We're not fancy, but we decided that was fine

I would clean the bathroom and counters and make the house hygienic, not immaculate. It's not a museum, and we made sure that our guests understood that we're welcoming them into our home as imperfect.

All of our dishes are mismatched because they're from two households combined over the years. We used formula pitchers for water jugs. We're not fancy, but we decided that was fine.

Some weekends it was hard to find people who were in town, and a couple times guests cancelled at the last minute and we had to scramble to invite more people. Sometimes the kids would be chaotic or we'd break a wine glass, but generally, it was manageable.

We're still going in 2026, and are booked through March

In this moment, I think, people feel very lonely, and I'm really glad that we were able to take meaningful actions to fix that in our lives.

Doing this was good for my mental health. 2025 was a hard year. I had two kids under two, I released a book, and my job working in politics was very hard. But despite all of that, I had a social life, time with my family and friends, and a clean bathroom every week. Plus I got to eat a lot of good food.

When people are over, I'm not looking at my phone, and I have real adult conversation, which is rare for me, especially outside of work. And some people who used to be just acquaintances are now friends, which I feel like is really hard to do when you're an adult.

I think it was really meaningful to have this thing that we did every week without question. It was just like, "this is what we do, who are we seeing this week?"

One thing I struggled with was letting go of reciprocity. We invite people a lot, but they don't invite us back. I had to remind myself that doesn't mean they don't like us.

Everyone has a different sense of comfort with hosting and with being the planner versus the guest. There's no moral valence to being an inviter, and letting go of keeping score was both hard and important.

We're very proud that we achieved our resolution, and we're going to try and keep doing it into 2026. We'll be less strict if folks cancel last minute, but we're booked through March right now.