Her friends RSVPd 'yes' on Partiful. Barely anyone showed up.

A “yes” RSVP used to have an agreed upon meaning: Definitely coming. 

But young people say these days, that’s not always the case.

“We have to have a conversation about Partiful etiquette,” 33-year-old influencer Aubrey Strobel posted in June 22 Instagram and TikTok videos that have since earned a collective 100,000 views. “If you RSVP, yes, I'm going, that means you're going. That doesn't mean you're supporting someone.”

Strobel used Partiful, a Gen Z-led event hosting and invitation platform, to invite friends to a June 20 get-together to celebrate her 10-year anniversary of living in New York. She invited 50 people and received 10 nos, three maybes, and 24 yeses. She spent $1,000 on food, alcohol and decorations, and spent the morning of the event preparing a speech, transporting pizza and setting up a table on the West Side Highway.

But when the afternoon came, only eight friends showed up. 

RSVP culture is changing. Some experts say it’s part of a broader shift in how young people think about community and social obligation amid a growing loneliness epidemic. As modern invitation platforms reshape how young people plan social gatherings, some users, like Strobel, worry that while they've made it easier to host, they've also made it easier to back out of commitments.

“I feel like RSVP culture is just lost right now,” Strobel says. “A lot because people are really flaky in 2026.”

What happened to RSVP etiquette?

Strobel told USA TODAY that the experience left her questioning her friendships. But after she posted about it online, she felt validated to see that so many had experienced the same problems.

“It’s definitely a major culture change post covid- people have gotten way too comfortable with canceling,” one person commented. “We also have to have a conversation about partiful invites. It’s made a lot of ppl lazy and they don’t send personal invites anymore,” said another commenter. 

The idea of apps like Partiful are to eliminate the need for finicky email threads and groupchats with a bunch of unknown numbers by instead putting all the info – guest list, event details and photos – in one place. Hosts and vendors can reach all their attendees with a single text blast. While Partiful and platforms like Apple Invites and Paperless Post are digitally-savvy successors to platforms like Evite and Facebook Events, Strobel says there are "real consequences" to the casual nature of RSVP culture.

“People don't take it as seriously,” Strobel says. “How could anyone plan for an event if you're just RSVPing for support?”

Partiful hosts also control a feature to allow attendees to see who else is going, which the platform says “builds hype and gets people to actually show up.” But Strobel says the feature contributes to a transactional nature where people tend to check if the guest list will benefit them before RSVPing. On the other hand, flaky partygoers might see a large number of RSVPs and think enough other people will show up in their place that they can skip.

“As a millennial, when you got an invitation in the mail, you never knew how many people were going to be there, and you didn't know who was going to be there,” Strobel says. “Peeking in the windows to a party isn't helping etiquette in 2026.”

Strobel’s first home when she moved to New York from Arizona as an aspiring broadcast journalist in 2016 was the YMCA on 47th Street. She lived in hostels, took on far commutes and built her life up with “zero friends” and “no money,” and envisioned her celebration as a way to honor how far she’s come.

But as the sun set over the West Side Highway, hundreds of dollars of leftover L’Industrie pizza sat untouched in boxes as spare Statue of Liberty hats went unworn. In the middle of her speech about what these past 10 years have meant to her, a passing child interrupted, “Where is everybody?”

“Even though I feel pretty secure, I was just like, ‘this is truly horrible. I don't want to ever do that again,’” Strobel says.

Party attendee Frank Chaparro, Strobel’s friend of 10 years, says that Strobel is the type of friend that “is always trying to go the extra mile,” and often hosts friends in her apartment.  

He chalked the event’s low attendance up to shifting social norms, and pointed out to her that in 2026, you have to follow up repeatedly to get people to RSVP.

Young people’s loneliness epidemic 

Jamil Zaki, a professor of psychology at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab, previously told USA TODAY that many of the former social infrastructures people used to rely on have eroded for young people.

Loneliness is something the former U.S. Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, has spoken extensively about. Even before the pandemic, roughly half of adults reported experiencing loneliness, but Murthy in the spring of 2023 declared America’s loneliness epidemic a public health crisis. He’s pointed out a steady decline in participation in faith organizations, recreational leagues and service organizations, and that fewer people go to school, get jobs, and raise families in the same towns they grew up in.

“Many of the defaults that made social connection part of the infrastructure of our lives are gone, which is hard because it means that we need to then make greater individual effort to make that happen,” says Zaki.

One of the ways sociologists once assessed people’s social connections, Zaki said, was by asking how many people they could count on to pick them up from the airport at 1 a.m. Today, there’s Uber for that. When Joey moves out of his apartment with Chandler in “Friends,” everyone helps him pack his stuff, but in 2026 he could've used a TaskRabbit. And in place of asking neighbors for help, there are delivery services like Postmates and Instacart.

Chaparro held wine and pasta nights with his friends as a student at Fordham University, but says those types of casual get-togethers don’t seem to happen as frequently anymore. He says while Gen X and Baby Boomers perhaps sacrificed their peace to make other people happy, young people have swung too far in the other direction, where the focus is too individual.

“There's more of a focus on, “What is going to make me feel the best that I can feel today?’ and that sort of tops now any sort of etiquette or social order,” Chaparro says.

How young people can build community

Studies have shown connections and friendships are good for our health and longevity.

“When we show up for others, our stress decreases, our sense of agency and autonomy increases, our happiness increases, and so when we focus on a hyper-individualistic, almost single-serving version of well-being… we actually are depriving ourselves of one of the great sources of well-being,” Zaki told USA TODAY.

And the reality is that most people want to make more friends.

Zaki previously likened building a community to making a resolution to go to the gym more: Intentionally showing up and taking responsibility for an aspect of your health.

“Statistically speaking, people want to connect with you way more than you realize,” Zaki told USA TODAY. “I think there's so much life out there with each other.”

Rachel Hale’s role covering Youth Mental Health at USA TODAY is supported by a partnership with Pivotal and Journalism Funding Partners. Funders do not provide editorial input.