“Part of this contrast is that the start time of parties is not supposed to be serious.” “Parties are supposed to be conceptual and experiential opposites of business meetings or classes,” Kevin Birth, an anthropologist at Queens College, City University of New York, told me. The precision of clock time governs much of our daily comings and goings, but at parties, we get a break from it and relax into event time. Part of it has to do with a fundamental tension between what’s called “clock time”-as in the numbers on a clock-and “event time,” a more fluid framework that follows our social rhythms, in which “activities are allowed to transpire according to their own spontaneous schedule,” as the late social psychologist Robert Levine wrote. How and why did we collectively decide that, at parties, a start time is usually only a rough suggestion? But if you really think about it, it’s also a bit curious in a society where meetings and appointments tend to have stricter start times. The fact that people typically don’t show up to parties all at the same time is so standard in American culture that it seems perfectly normal. “If you don’t think carefully about all the different factors, then you might wind up … showing up five minutes after the person who you really wanted to spend time with left,” he said. Although Biss doesn’t plan to use it himself anytime soon, he did say that writing it was instructive listing out possible arrival-time considerations prompted him to think about whether his own arrival times line up with what he wants to get out of parties. Okay, so maybe a formula like this is a little silly. The formula then spits out how many minutes after the party’s start time you should aim to arrive. The result, which you can see-and plug your own numbers into-below, accounts for how punctual your friends are, how early or late you prefer to be, how excited you are about the party, and how accurately you tend to predict the time you’ll get there. Years ago, when a friend of his, the novelist John Green, wanted to have a precocious character in one of his books develop a formula for predicting the outcome of a romantic relationship, Biss drew up a delightfully complex one with variables such as the “Dumper/Dumpee differential.” It appears in the book An Abundance of Katherines and produces results that can be plotted on a graph.īiss, a former math professor at the University of Chicago (and the current mayor of Evanston, Illinois), accepted my request to make a similarly preposterous formula for calculating the perfect time to arrive at a party. I like the simplicity of the 38-minute rule, but for help with some more complicated arrival-time calculus, I reached out to someone with a deep understanding of, well, calculus: Daniel Biss, a mathematician who appreciates how quantification can veer into absurdity. (For a larger, rowdier house party, he shoots for an hour after the start time.) “30 minutes would too early, and 45 too late,” he explained. For instance, my friend Sam Brodey, a political reporter in Washington, D.C., has a “38-minute rule”: For low-key parties with friends and food, he typically likes to show up 38 minutes after the stated start time. When we go to a party, we all run our own little calculations (consciously or not) to try to identify this golden moment. Most likely, you want to arrive just as the party’s gaining real momentum, a Goldilocks window of time that’s neither early nor late. If you show up long after everyone else, you might miss the best parts or risk rudeness. The optimal arrival time accounts for several different, sometimes competing considerations: If you’re the first one there, it can be a little awkward (trust me), and the host might not be quite ready. Because if you arrive at the stated start time, chances are that, like me, you’ll be the first one there. Now that parties are back for many people, so is the timeless question of when you should show up. I was generally spared this fate earlier in the pandemic, when many parties became dangerous and I had far fewer to attend. Even when I actively try to show up later, to seem more like a normal human, I still somehow end up among the first to walk in the door. My role at parties is, unfortunately, to be the one who shows up way before everyone else.
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