The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

“I draw a swimming pool,” he said. “There is a deep end and a shallow end. You can choose whatever end you want to enter. If you want to tell us your deepest secrets, you can. Or you can be superficial, and getting wet means being real, so bring something that is real for you.” It is important, Lim said, to offer an “invitation to intimacy, but dep

The kinds of gatherings I specialize in creating could be terrifying to people who share this sensibility. That doesn’t mean there is no place for such gatherings, or that people with this inclination need to just take or leave it, or that they should not be invited. It means that some of your guests will share her aversion, and if you are going to

When you’re asking people to go deeper, to share what they don’t usually share, you must manage the risk-taking you are encouraging. Sometimes that means prodding people to take more risk; other times, it means soothing people afraid of taking risk.

A gathering’s blandness is a symptom of a disease. We must treat the disease. And what is the disease? That the gathering makes no effort to do what the best gatherings do: transport us to a temporary alternative world.

If the standards of etiquette are fixed, imperious, and exclusionary, pop-up rules have the power to flip these traits on their head, creating the possibility of more experimental, humble, and democratic—and satisfying!—gatherings.

As with purpose, it is often through conflict and disgruntlement that underlying assumptions about a gathering’s social contract reveal themselves.

Why is a gathering a social contract? Because it proceeds from an understanding between host and guest, sometimes stated and sometimes unstated, about what each is willing to offer to make it a success.

The host can also set the context for the gathering. When I was invited to the sixteenth annual #Agrapalooza, continuing a summer tradition of made-up games and a drunken talent show at some friends’ parents’ house, building on the rituals and memories of all the gatherings before, I was being invited into a world, not just to an event.

What could be less democratic than etiquette, which must be internalized for years before showing up at an event? A rule requires no advance preparation. Thus someone who has just arrived in a country and is unfamiliar with its culture, but is able to read an email, can fully, without embarrassment, partake in a rules-based gathering—but would stru