I’m the same dinner guest with or without a partner – so why the snub?
Relationships03.09.2025
I have a married girlfriend, Sara-Jane, who has invited me to her and her husband’s dinner parties throughout all my marriages (yes, plural!) and relationships (too many!).
But what is incredible – and oh so rare – is that she has invited me to join her and her husband – and their couple friends – as often during my single years as the ones when I was paired up.
While this may sound like a plot line from a 90s movie, single women everywhere are often still battling the “third-wheel” label, leading to exclusion from invite lists and couples events when they end a relationship or are widowed.
I would know; I’ve lived it myself.
A girlfriend of mine, who is married, once told me more than a decade after my first marriage broke up of how she was sorry she hadn’t been in touch, but she just didn’t know what to do with me now that I was single.
And don’t get me wrong, it’s not that friends aren’t happy to see a single girlfriend during the week for a girls’ night.
But when it comes to couples events, that coveted extra seat at the table is often forgotten.
RSVP? Maybe not
While this idea may be new to you, it’s more prevalent amongst single women than you might think.
Julie Carl, a Toronto-based journalist, saw this bias from the other side when she invited a single girlfriend to join a dinner party with her, her partner, and two other couples.
After the party, her friend wrote her a note thanking her “for including her even though she wasn’t married.”
“I said: ‘What are you talking about?’ She said: ‘Single women do not get invited to dinner parties.’ I thought she was nuts!” Carl shared.
The saga continued a year later when Carl hosted the same group, but was now single herself. To her surprise, none of her couple friends brought their husbands.
“Without realizing what they were doing, they put my event in a different category,” said Carl. “Let’s call it on the B list, not so important as the events on the A list when you hire a babysitter and make sure your spouse shows up when he is invited.”
Author Bella DePaulo explores a similar idea in her book Single at Heart: The Power, Freedom, and Heart-Filling Joy of Single Life.
“I think it is part of a larger couple’s culture,” she says. “Many people who marry or become romantically coupled seem to feel that they have attained a higher status – they are now in the Couples Club. Single people, because they are single, are not good enough to be in the club.”
Now whether it’s fear of making a single friend feel like the third, fifth or even seventh wheel, or oversight on the hosts part, I’m not sure, but New York magazine columnist Alana Massey wrote about her notable acceptance to the “couples club” after she got into a relationship for the first time in years.
“All of a sudden, it’s like I got my name put on a secret list I didn’t even know I wanted to be on, complete with secret brunches hosted at couples’ adorably appointed co-habitation spaces and even plans for going on vacations with other couples,” she wrote. “Even my own married parents are way more stoked that I’m coming to visit now that I have a man in tow.”
So, where do we go from here?
If this story reminds you of Bridget Jones’s Diary, with the main character in that bestselling book dividing up her friends into “singletons” and “smug marrieds,” it should. But that book came out in 1996. Are we not past this? Seemingly not.
I still have female friends who are married who see me all the time for dinners out at restaurants and regale me with tales of the dinner parties they have hosted recently with their couple friends.
I can see as they recount what they cooked for their friends and talked about at those parties, that it never even occurs to them that this could be making me wonder why they aren’t inviting me.
I am, after all, the same personable, delightful dinner guest, whether I’m single or with a partner. (Maybe even more delightful, considering some of the disagreeable partners I have had!)
But, as someone who has lived through this before, here’s my advice to you: Don’t let it get to you, or cause you to question your value as a friend, partner or dinner guest for that matter.
Oh, and find your own Sara-Jane, who will unapologetically save a seat at her table for you, no matter what.
