How to Host a Hangout When Your Friends Don’t Know Each Other
You want to have a few friends over. You like all of them, and you have a feeling they’d like each other, too. The only catch is that most of them have never met.
Suddenly, inviting people over sounds like signing up to personally prevent every awkward silence for an entire evening.
With Halloween coming up, there are plenty of excuses to gather people for costumes, candy, or a movie you’ll mostly talk through. But whether you’re planning a seasonal hangout or just trying to get a few friends in the same place, it helps to give people an easy way to get to know each other.
That doesn’t require an elaborate plan. A few thoughtful introductions and something simple to do together can go a long way.
Give some thought to the guest list
You might have a good reason to think two of your friends would get along. Maybe they both get very invested in making Halloween costumes, or you’ve separately heard each of them explain why their favorite terrible movie is secretly brilliant.
But they don’t know those things about each other yet. As the person who knows them both, you can help by sharing what made you want to introduce them in the first place.
Before you get to introductions, though, think about the people you’d like to invite:
Who have I been wanting to introduce, and why?
What might they enjoy talking about or doing together?
Will anyone be arriving without knowing anybody besides me?
Shared interests are a helpful starting point, but your friends don’t need matching personalities or identical hobbies. Maybe one loves telling stories and another asks great follow-up questions. Or two people with very different lives share a very specific sense of humor.
Pay particular attention to anyone joining an otherwise established group. If everyone else knows each other from college, give your newer friend a heads-up so they aren’t trying to figure out whether they’ve met all these people before and somehow forgotten. Once they arrive, make an introduction before disappearing into the kitchen.
Make introductions people can do something with
There’s nothing wrong with “This is my friend from work” or asking someone how they feel about candy corn. Those can get a conversation started! Adding a specific detail gives people a little more to work with.
For example:
“You both make such good costumes. Alex built a full-sized Ent out of cardboard, and Sam just got back from a convention with about fifteen ideas for what to make next.”
Now they have a few possible directions: the costume, the convention, how you even begin building a cardboard tree you can wear. Personally, I have questions about doorways.
You can also give each friend a bit of context beforehand: “I’m excited for you to meet Jordan. They’re the person I told you about who’s also trying to learn tarot.”
Stick to things your friends would be comfortable having shared. “You both just went through terrible breakups!” may be accurate, but let’s give people a chance to take their coats off and decide whether they want to get into that.
After you’ve made the connection, give them a chance to take it somewhere. There’s no need to keep presenting evidence that they should become friends.
Choose something easy to join
Full transparency: this past weekend, I goofed on this. I invited four friends over to play pinochle, a family card game I’ve been angling to learn for years.
It turned out to be a much bigger undertaking than I’d expected. Between the rules and the different variations, we were facing a serious amount of studying before we could start playing. Apparently, I had invited everyone over for friendship-homework.
We pivoted to a card game with a five-step wikiHow article and called it good.
For this particular group, that worked much better. My friends didn’t really know each other yet, and the simpler game left us enough attention to have a conversation while we played.
That’s a useful thing to look for when you’re choosing an activity: can people participate without needing to concentrate on it the entire time?
A few options:
Pumpkin painting or simple crafts. Have supplies ready and make it clear that no artistic ability is expected. A jack-o-lantern whose mouth accidentally came out looking like a goatee absolutely gives everyone something to talk about.
An easy card or board game. Choose one you can explain fairly quickly, ideally without eliminating someone early and leaving them watching everyone else play. Being the first to lose is less fun when your consolation prize is forty minutes of watching people you just met do math.
A movie with time to hang out around it. Let people know if you’re choosing something scary, and leave time for snacks and conversation before or afterward. “Halloween movie” means very different things to someone expecting Hocus Pocus and to someone queuing up The Exorcist.
A casual dessert potluck. Store-bought is welcome. If someone brings a family recipe or a candy they loved growing up, you have an easy opening to ask about it. Nobody needs to defend their grocery-store cookies with a moving personal narrative.
The activity can also be optional. Someone might be perfectly happy chatting while the rest of you paint pumpkins, and that still counts as participating in the hangout.
Help people find their way into the conversation
Once everyone’s there, you don’t have to direct every exchange. It does help to notice when someone has been left without an obvious way in.
If a few friends are telling a story full of names nobody else recognizes, add some context: “For everyone who wasn’t there, this was our first attempt at a camping trip.” Your newer friends will have a much easier time following along once they know that Kevin is someone’s dog and not just a friend you sent outside because they looked like they might need to “go potty.”
When you notice yourself talking mostly to the person you know best, turn toward someone newer and bring them into the conversation. You can also check in privately with a quieter guest rather than announcing to everyone that they haven’t said much.
Some people take longer to warm up. Give them openings without making them feel watched; “You’re so quiet!” rarely makes someone more excited to speak.
Leave some space for it to be a little awkward
Your friends might not immediately click. A conversation may trail off, or the activity you planned might turn out to require an advanced degree in cards. Speaking from recent experience, you can change the game.
Try not to treat every pause as evidence that the hangout is going badly. People who have just met are still figuring each other out, and sometimes someone is just very focused on getting dip onto a structurally unsound chip.
Make a few thoughtful introductions, give everyone something easy to join, and let the evening develop from there. Your friends don’t need to leave as a newly formed, inseparable group. Having a good time with someone they’ll be happy to see again is plenty.