No reciprocation from friends re dinner

[ateddybearfromdelaware1]

Has anyone else experienced this?

Me and my partner invite friends round to ours to catch up, make a nice meal and have a nice evening.
We've had several couples over individually and sometimes groups.

It's never reciprocated! I find this quite rude, especially as I have dc and they don't, plus the cost of food, drinks and the effort to cook everything.

I know they don't have to invite us around but surely it's curtious?

Scented - suggest going to a restaurant you've always wanted to try? Although why would you want to be friends with people you don't want to see ?

Surely if you don't want to go to someone's house for dinner, then you don't really want to be friends therefore don't care too much what they think about your excuses?

BackforGood we are very sociable and we do all of those social things you suggest in addition to the dinner party thing. Having people round for dinner is just one small aspect of our social life. I do hate cooking, (hopefully our friends don't realise this, I am gracious in my hosting - well, I hope), and I'm pleased when it's not my 'turn'. Hence I'd be a bit pissed off if i was the op!

I'm afraid we're the non-reciprocating couple in our social set-up. Hardly ever do we get an invite these days - because of it I'm sure. I love entertaining but DH has a horror of "ending up like your parents" - i.e. my parents, whose social life was too full on really. He uses the huge amounts of his clutter as an excuse "We need to tidy up then we can have XYZ over" "Let's do it then" "Err" "I'll do it then " "ER it's my stuff, don't interfere with it"

We occasionally have one particular couple over & eat in the kitchen but can't sit in the lounge because he's embarrassed by the mess. Grrr.

We have some old friends in their 60's - we've known them 20-odd years and always went to each others periodically for dinner.

This was fine before we had children but now we have two kids, we find it much more difficult for various reasons including babysitting (practicalities and cost), schedule (husband works some weekends) but mainly because we have several different groups of friends who don't know each other and it's hard to make time regularly for everyone.

We are in our 40s so completely different life stage to our 60-something friends. They can stay up late drinking and then have a lie-in, for example - we can't.

Added to this that they brag about having retired early while we will have to work much longer. Oh and bragging about their healthy bank balances. And I haven't even started on the increasingly terrible cooking (boiled potatoes and cabbage - when you've paid for a babysitter!).

The worst thing is that after we do reluctantly go for dinner with them, they are texting us afterwards to say what a lovely evening it was and when can we do it again.

No idea how to handle it really. Just a good thing that we are genuinely busy!