Potlucks

I have been thinking a lot lately about reciprocity, and about how difficult it has become to create the kind of community so many of us say we are missing.

This is complicated territory for me, because I was once a very dedicated self-love coach. I grew up in religious extremism, in a world where obligation and self-sacrifice were confused with righteousness, and learning that access to me was my right alone was fundamental to my recovery. I had to learn that I was not responsible for everyone else’s feelings, that saying no did not make me selfish, and that love was not measured by how much of myself I was willing to give away. I believed so deeply in that work that I spent years helping other people find that freedom too, and I still believe it is one of the most profound evolutions in my life.

At the same time, I remember church potlucks.

I remember tables overflowing with homemade food and family recipes. It was like a frequent Thanksgiving. People didn’t just attend; they prepared for each other with pride. Someone made the dish everyone loved, someone brought enough for twice as many people as were coming, and of course several women showed up carrying crockpots. Moms organized events together, details were planned, and there was an enormous amount of intention and care woven into community. And everyone just took it for granted, because it was routine.

I don’t look back at all of that through rose-colored glasses. A grossly disproportionate amount of that labor fell on women, and much of it wasn’t really optional. Women were expected to cook, organize, remember, volunteer, serve, clean, care for children, and make communal life happen, often while the work itself was barely acknowledged. I still see this enormous labor imbalance everywhere. I don’t want that back.

But I do want the care back.

Condemnation of Inconvenience

I wonder sometimes whether we did such a thorough job of learning to recognize exploitation that we became suspicious of obligation altogether. We learned to protect our peace, guard our energy, stop overextending ourselves, and remove relationships that consistently drain us. All of that can be incredibly healthy - and necessary. The problem is that regular relationships are also sometimes draining. Community is sometimes inconvenient. People we love need us at bad times, events happen when we would rather stay home, someone has to organize the gathering, and someone (many people!) has to make the food.

There is a difference between being exploited and being inconvenienced, and I am not sure we have talked enough about where that line is.

And somehow, everyone seems to be lamenting the loss of community. We don’t know our neighbors. Friendships dissolve more easily. Parents don’t have a village. People are lonely. We miss third places and spontaneous gatherings and relationships that have real depth. We want people who notice when we’re struggling, bring food when we’re sick, celebrate our milestones, help when life falls apart, and know us well enough to realize when something isn’t right. We want people to notice.

But that kind of community is incredibly difficult to build if our highest relational priority is avoiding inconvenience.

Those people don’t magically appear when something needs noticing. They become our people through years of ordinary persistent investment in one another. We go to the birthday party when we feel like staying home. We bring something to dinner when time is a little tight. We help organize the event. We check in. We make the drive. We show up for things that aren’t necessarily our thing because they matter to someone we love. We do a thousand small things that we were technically under no obligation to do, and eventually all of those little acts entangle us with other lives.

The Potluck Problem

I think about this every time I try to organize a potluck now. It is astonishingly difficult to recreate those overflowing tables I remember, and I don’t think that is really about cooking. A potluck is just a particularly visible example of something that has changed in the way we participate in community.

The magic of a potluck is that nobody has to provide the whole meal. One person might spend hours making something elaborate, someone might throw together a salad, another might pick up bread on the way, and someone who is having a terrible week might bring absolutely nothing. It doesn’t need to be equal. It works because enough people come with the basic commitment that they are contributing to something rather than simply attending.

But the table has evolved. Increasingly, there are three loaves of bread, two store bought desserts and one dish of substance. When enough people stop making a joint effort, somebody else has to fill the gap. The person who notices there isn’t enough food makes more. The organizer absorbs another expense. The host makes three things because she knows several people won’t bring anything of substance. The gathering still happens, everyone enjoys themselves, and from the outside it looks like community. But the community is often being produced by two or three people.

Eventually those people get tired.

The usual self-care advice point is to stop. Stop overgiving. Match people’s energy. Don’t continue investing where your investment isn’t reciprocated. I understand that perspective because I have lived it. For a season, I stopped doing the things that weren’t reciprocal, and in some ways it was a relief. I wasn’t carrying nearly as much. But I was also miserable.

I love hosting. I love cooking and creating and facilitating. I love making spaces feel warm and bringing people together. Those things aren’t only unpaid labor someone conditioned me to perform; they are part of how I love people and part of what makes my own life feel meaningful. Withholding all of that because other people weren’t matching it didn’t feel empowering. It felt like another kind of punishment.

That is the conundrum I still haven’t entirely solved. Carrying the lion’s share of the labor, expense, and emotional investment isn’t sustainable, but refusing to give more than I receive leaves me living in a world I don’t particularly want to live in either. If the solution to an empty potluck is for the last person bringing a casserole to finally stop, we have achieved equality, but we haven’t created anything better.

Reciprocity Doesn’t Mean Equal

Perhaps we need to talk more about reciprocity and less about equality. Reciprocity isn’t keeping score. It isn’t noticing that I cooked last time and therefore you owe me dinner, or deciding that everyone needs to contribute the same amount of money, time, food, or effort. That would make relationships exhausting in an entirely different way.

People have different talents and labor and skills to give, and our ability to give changes throughout our lives. Sometimes someone is sick or grieving or broke or overwhelmed and the rest of us carry them for a while. That isn’t a lack of reciprocity; that is one of the reasons we need community in the first place.

What matters is whether we generally see ourselves as active contributors to the communities we belong to. Maybe I cook and you stay afterward to clean. Maybe you don’t have money to contribute but you have a car and can give someone a ride. Maybe one person loves organizing and another person reliably shows up early to help. Maybe this month you have nothing at all and we take care of you. The point isn’t to make everyone’s contribution equal. The point is that the responsibility for caring doesn’t continually settle onto the same few shoulders.

There is a huge difference between expecting everyone to contribute equally and expecting people to care about contributing. I think we’re losing that distinction.

Keeping the Heart

I don’t think the answer is to roll back the self-love movement. I certainly found it life-saving. I know too well what existed on the other side of it.

What I want is to keep the freedom we fought for without losing the heart that existed in some of those older forms of community. I want to get rid of the assumption that women will make the casseroles without getting rid of casseroles. I want men at the table to feel just as responsible for feeding people, organizing things, checking in, cleaning up, and noticing what needs to be done. I want care to become more shared, not less common.

Maybe self-love was never supposed to mean building a life in which nobody gets to inconvenience us. Maybe learning that our needs matter was supposed to help us enter relationships more freely, where care is something we choose rather than something extracted from us.

Because there is no version of deep community that never asks anything of us.

People will inconvenience us. They will need things when we are tired. They will invite us to events we aren’t particularly excited about. Sometimes we will cook when ordering takeout would have been easier, spend an afternoon helping when we could have spent it alone, or show up simply because our presence matters to somebody else. That doesn’t automatically mean we have poor boundaries. Sometimes it means we have a rich community of people in our lives.

Perhaps alongside asking whether something serves us, drains us, or protects our peace, we need to make room for another question: what am I helping to create?

If everyone showed up the way I show up, would the communities I value become stronger, or would there be nothing left for any of us to show up to?

I don’t want the gendered obligation back. I don’t want guilt, self-erasure, or a culture that praises people for running themselves empty in service of everyone else. Self-love taught me that I am one of the people deserving my care, and I will always be grateful for that.

I just don’t want to live in a world where caring for ourselves requires us to care less for each other.

I want the overflowing tables without the women exhausted in the kitchen. I want the freedom to say no alongside a willingness to say yes simply because someone else matters. I want us to honor our boundaries without treating every inconvenience as something toxic that needs to be trashed.

I want us to keep the heart.