Updated: Why Don’t We Feel Comfortable Having People Over?

The cost of keeping connection conditional

I grew up in a house with stuff. It was cozy and warm and inviting, and things did not have a place. We operated in piles. Piles for laundry, piles for paperwork, piles for assorted knickknacks. In my youth, I didn’t think much of this system, but as a teen, it became a reason not to have people over. Somewhere along the way, the unspoken rules of what a “good” home looked like and what a “different” home looked like seeped into my worldview. I added it to the growing list of things to not be when I grew up: a mess.

The mess was a continual source of contention through those years teeange years. When I was stressed, I would spend hours organizing drawers and writing up systems for my family to follow—all of which failed to catch on. The cycle of vowing to completely change the way I move through the world with sheer grit is a delusion I’ve held into my fourth decade of life.

Recently, I started messing around with the concept of acceptance regarding my natural propensity to live in a series of expanding and contracting messes.

And so my house has been in various stages of “mess” since March. Sometimes it’s a little messy, with an errant sock under a chair, a forgotten bowl on the side table, and a basket of laundry tucked away in the corner. And then there are weeks when laundry stacks high on dressers, dishes pile up, and the kids’ rooms explode in a way that renders the carpet invisible. You have to swim your way through the toys and the clothes and the knickknacks.

I can’t remember when exactly I surrendered to the chaos. It was around the time I started therapy or maybe a little before. All I remember is there was a moment when I realized this wasn’t a time in my life when I could keep up with tidying the way I had been. This is what we do when we’re in acceptance, we give ourselves what we need.

Today I want to talk about how we deem our homes unfit for connection and why closed doors block out not only the bad but also the good.

What Home Means to Each of Us

I recently put up this prompt on Instagram: Are you comfortable having people in your home? If not, why? It garnered a lot of responses. The majority of people fell into one of the following four categories:

• Yes. It builds connection and community and allows them to be seen by the people they are moving through life with.

• It depends on the guests. Their social batteries tend to be depleted around certain people and they need strong boundaries in specific relationships.

• No. Their home is a safe haven and it is overstimulating to have people in it.

• No. They want to have people in their spaces but believe their house isn’t ready or worthy of guests and worry about the risk of judgment.

The fourth reason struck me the most. Reading through each response, I found myself thinking about how we judge ourselves, how we project our judgment onto other people, and how that cycle of judgment perpetuates in our circles over time.

It’s clear from the way I present my home and my lifestyle online that I live in a house in which hosting is easy. In many ways, hosting as often as I do is a sort of catharsis for the years I spent hiding from friends in those formative teen years. It’s been important to me, something I have thought about since unlocking the door to my first tiny apartment. When I unlocked the door to my first apartment after graduation, I immediately imagined my friends huddled around my dinged up secondhand IKEA table that I loved dearly.

Something happens as those early adult years fade into adulthood, and a clean and tidy home becomes a status symbol for having your life together. Mess becomes a sign of failure—not an indicator of the variety of life stages, brain chemistry, and preferences a person may have. In fact, I believe that our inability to hold space for mess cuts out huge parts of our identity that, with a little bit of attention and acceptance, could bring us home to the truth of ourselves in a way that changes our future trajectory.

What if instead of hiding ourselves from our closest, safest friends, we show up for each other without needing to have our literal shit together? When did our physical mess become grounds for ostracization?

When we make connection conditional, it becomes easier and easier to keep the door closed, to put off inviting that friend over for dinner, to keep a part of yourself hidden from view from the people who love you unconditionally.

Hosting in an “Imperfect” Space

Having someone in your messy house feels like being exposed, and not in a good way. I often think, Are they looking at that pile of unread mail? I bet they haven’t had a pile of mismatched socks sitting on their couch for the past two weeks. You feel exposed, judged, and less than, when in reality it’s not them having those thoughts, it’s you. The cherry on top is that we feel shame for caring what other people think, because on top of all the repressed shame we’ve been programmed to hold, we’re supposed to just get over it—or at least not show signs of caring. It’s an impossible shame loop where you’re ashamed for feeling shame.

How does one remove the block of hosting people in an imperfect space? I want to plant a few seeds with you today, walking through some common blocks to opening your doors and offering up a new way to frame each one without having to exert effort, time, or money to mask the stage of life you are in right now.

Thought: My home is too small.
Reframe: My home is cozy and intimate.
Idea: Invite only one friend over instead of an entire group.

Thought: My home is too messy.
Reframe: My home is holding me through a challenging season in life.
Idea: What if a friend came over to help you fold laundry and watch reality TV? What if you had a friend over to help you weed the backyard? What if we not only accepted the mess but also accepted help to come back to baseline?

Thought: My home is too shabby and isn’t beautifully decorated.
Reframe: My home is continually evolving.
Idea: Don’t apologize for your home. Light candles, put throws over stained cushions, play the music you love, and own it. 

Thought: I am a terrible host.
Reframe: I am a good friend.
Idea: Hosting can be a loaded word. Hosting is really just having friends over for a hang. You decide how you want to welcome people in your house.  

Each of these ideas is about opening the door to connection now rather than waiting until the conditions change. It's a powerful gift to yourself and can set off a chain reaction of gratitude through your life where you were unable to access it before. You may realize that while you don’t want to be in this state forever, you are doing okay. 

Fostering Connection

At its core, hosting people in our homes fosters connection in the relationships that matter to us. Many of us lack this connection, particularly after years of physical separation during the pandemic. Conversations feel clunky. We feel out of practice, awkward, and stale. 

If your home is not where you want it to be, you have to show yourself some grace. If you know you want to have people over, being brave and inviting them in despite this worry might be worth it. 

Like a lot of things in life, we often experience resistance to what we need the most. When faced with this kind of resistance, we can either throw up our hands and give into it or accept that the resistance exists and move past it anyway.

Moving Through Discomfort

Having people in a home that you feel insecure about is scary. There isn’t a way around that. But discomfort and pain are the norm in life, no matter how hard we try to run from these feelings. Sometimes, I wonder if we’re trying to remove obstacles that are just part of being human.

Having people over when you don’t feel ready is a way of practicing a kind of self-acceptance that feels uncomfortable, but that will ultimately leave you feeling better than if you completely avoid it. The goal isn’t to remove discomfort entirely but to learn to move through it easily. To be seen by people you already feel safe with, or open yourself up to someone you love but have kept at arm's length. With practice, this kind of situational discomfort fades over time and affects us less.

Lessons in Imperfection

Here’s what I’ve learned about myself through letting others into my home when it is less than perfect: My imperfect home is a way of showing people I’m willing to be myself with them without having to say it. When I am not hiding this facet of my life from others, my relationships become infinitely better and more rewarding. Would I prefer having people over when my house is clean? Yes. But that’s not something I can consistently do in this stage of life.

I’ve come to accept the inevitable mess in my house because I participate in life, not avoid it. This led me to a transformative realization: My messes are the raw material I work with best. They are my teacher, my process, my mind—a chaotic swirl of things and tasks and ideas and hopes and desires and future plans. I work well in chaos. Maybe you do, too. So why try to be anything else? 

If you were to come to my house for a dinner party, yes the space would be beautiful. But I might forget to give you a glass and you’d see the forks do not match, the seat cushions come off the chairs, and the table is a little wobbly. But you’d feel my care—I host because I want to connect and make something beautiful for you. When I think about why I do this in this stage of life, I see how much my mess makes me who I am—a unique fingerprint expressing itself through my spaces, my words, and my food. It is uncomfortable to show it. It is scary to show up and say: I care and I am imperfect. And after each time I’ve done it, I’ve learned a little bit about how to do it differently. It gets a little less scary to be seen.

When you accept where you are in life and hold on to your worth despite not being where you want to be, the path forward looks clearer. Showing yourself to others reveals the people who are for you as well as the people who are not. And that’s wonderful, because now you know. There is a greater appreciation for what you have at this moment. And I’m not really sure there is a more validating reason to have someone over to your beautifully imperfect, warm, and loving space.