“We should grab food sometime.”
“Yeah, definitely.”
And then both people never mention it again.
Humanity has probably executed this protocol billions of times.
An anonymous social-media discussion recently revolved around a simple twist: instead of treating “sometime” as disposable politeness, one person actually proposed dates and plans—and a surprisingly large share of those plans really happened.
That raises a useful question: what if many people are not unwilling to meet at all, but are simply waiting to be invited?
The inviter worries that rejection will be awkward. The invitee worries that declining will hurt the inviter. Both sides estimate imaginary social damage, nobody sends POST /invite, and the calendar remains empty even when mutual goodwill is perfectly adequate.
Call it the invitation-waiting deadlock.
Research does not show that everyone secretly wants every invitation. What it does show is more interesting: people often mispredict how welcome outreach will be, hesitate to reconnect even when they want to, exaggerate the social damage of declining, and mishandle ambiguous RSVP responses. The bottleneck is sometimes not affection but activation energy.
TL;DR — The bottleneck in making friends may be the calendar, not the affection
- “We should hang out sometime” is not a binary choice between 100% sincere and 100% fake.
- There is a huge middle category: “I would not organize it myself, but I would happily go if invited.”
- People tend to underestimate how much recipients appreciate being contacted.
- After conversations, people often underestimate how much their partners liked them and enjoyed the interaction—the “liking gap.”
- In research on old friends, fewer than one third sent a message even when they wanted to reconnect, expected the friend to appreciate it, had the contact information, and were given time to send it.
- Invitees tend to overestimate the negative consequences of declining an invitation.
- People also hesitate to ask to join others’ plans more than the plan-holders would prefer.
- Invitees overestimate how much inviters prefer “maybe” over a clear “no.”
A practical rule follows: invite lightly and specifically, do not turn one “no” into a verdict on the relationship, and stop pushing when vagueness or refusal becomes a pattern.
1. “Sometime” is not a Boolean
We love to classify a vague invitation as either:
true: they genuinely want to gofalse: pure politeness
Real people are not that clean.
A more realistic spectrum is:
- I really want to go and will initiate myself.
- I want to go and will probably accept a concrete invitation.
- I am neutral; I may go if the timing and activity fit.
- I would rather not go, but I do not want to make the moment awkward.
- I definitely do not want to go.
The socially important part is the enormous territory around 2 and 3.
Someone can like you, enjoy seeing you, and still fail to search for a place, compare calendars, risk a rejection, and send the message.
If one person says, “How about Wednesday or Friday next week?”, the other person’s job changes from project management to choosing an option.
Sometimes friendship formation is less about “building chemistry” and more about closing an unassigned ticket.
2. Why the invitation-waiting deadlock happens
If both people would go when invited, the solution appears obvious. In production, however:
A: I would go if B invited me.
B: I would go if A invited me.
A -> B: no message
B -> A: no message
Result: both stay home.
Several frictions pile up.
Fear of a small rejection
A declined dinner is not a breakup. Yet the mind can translate “I can’t that day” into “maybe they don’t want to see me.” Even a tiny anticipated sting can prevent an invitation.
Over-reading inconvenience
“Would I bother them?” “What if their earlier comment was just politeness?” “Am I making them do the awkward work of declining?” Consideration is useful, but maximized consideration can prevent all initiation.
Planning is genuinely annoying
Choose a place. Compare schedules. Book. Rebook. A problem that feels philosophically interpersonal may actually be a calendar-interface problem.
No owner, no event
Groups amplify the effect. Everyone wants the outing. Everyone waits for somebody else to say, “Okay, Saturday at 7.” The plan does not fail from lack of desire; it dies from lack of an owner.
3. Study 1 — Outreach is often more appreciated than senders expect
Liu and colleagues found a robust tendency for people initiating contact to underestimate how much recipients appreciate being reached out to.
The gap was larger in more surprising contexts and between more socially distant people. The very thought that makes the sender hesitate—“this might be a bit unexpected”—can contribute to the recipient experiencing the contact as pleasantly surprising.
This is not a license to ignore boundaries. It does mean that your prediction, “this will probably bother them,” should not be treated as an objective instrument reading.
4. Study 2 — We may underestimate how much people liked talking to us
Boothby and colleagues documented the “liking gap”: after conversations, people systematically underestimated how much their conversation partners liked them and enjoyed their company.
That does not prove that every enjoyable conversation should produce another meeting. But it helps explain why two people can both have a decent time and still fail to initiate the next interaction.
The conversation succeeded; both dashboards somehow display “other person’s satisfaction: low.”
Not a bug. Apparently a human default.
5. Study 3 — Wanting to reconnect is not the same as actually doing it
Aknin and Sandstrom’s 2024 research makes the activation problem unusually concrete.
In some studies, participants wanted to contact an old friend, expected that friend to appreciate the message, had the friend’s contact information, and were given time to draft and send a message. Fewer than one third actually sent it.
The authors found evidence that old friends can start to feel psychologically like strangers, increasing hesitation.
The practical implication is important: lack of initiation is weak evidence for lack of interest. Motivation and execution are different variables.
6. A declined invitation is not a “relationship terminated” notification
Givi and Kirk found that invitees overestimated how much declining would anger or disappoint inviters, signal lack of care, or reduce future invitations.
A “no” can reflect work, another commitment, exhaustion, money, a desire to rest alone, or dislike of the activity rather than dislike of the person.
It may be 409 Schedule Conflict, not 403 Relationship Forbidden.
Inferring an entire relationship from one declined date is essentially deploying a model trained on a sample size of one.
7. “Maybe” can be operationally worse than “no”
“Maybe I can make it” feels softer to the invitee. It keeps the option open and avoids the bluntness of a direct decline.
But Givi and colleagues found that invitees often overestimate how much inviters prefer “maybe” to “no,” in part because invitees underestimate how much more disrespected inviters may feel by the ambiguous response.
The practical reason is obvious. A “no” lets the organizer finalize numbers, invite someone else, book seats, and buy the correct amount of food. A “maybe” puts the plan into a Schrödinger RSVP state.
If attendance is unlikely, “I can’t that day, but invite me next time” may actually be kinder operationally than indefinite ambiguity.
8. How to invite: low pressure, high specificity, easy exit
The invitation does not need to become an emotional event.
A useful pattern is:
Want to try this place next week? I’m free Wednesday or Friday. No worries if neither works—we can do it another time.
Specificity lowers coordination cost; the easy exit lowers pressure.
By contrast, “When are you free? What do you want to do? Where should we go?” can turn a casual invitation into a requirements meeting.
Read patterns, not single events
| Response | Reasonable interpretation |
|---|---|
| “Can’t that day, but I’m free on the 20th” | Strong positive signal; they supplied an alternative |
| “Sounds good—what place?” | Positive; they are participating in the details |
| One “Sorry, can’t” | Nearly inconclusive; the date may simply be bad |
| Repeated “sometime!” with no alternative | Priority is probably low; stop chasing |
| Repeated non-response or refusals | Respect the boundary and back off |
Do not treat one rejection as total rejection. But do not overwrite repeated rejection with “they secretly want to come” either.
9. People even hesitate to ask, “Can I join?” more than hosts want
Research on self-invitation found that potential joiners asked to join others’ plans less often than the plan-holders would prefer.
One reason was a mistaken story: “They probably considered inviting me and deliberately decided not to.” Plan-holders often had not gone through that exclusion process at all.
Humans are remarkably good at generating narratives from missing data.
No invitation does not necessarily mean an exclusion log exists. Sometimes there is no log.
10. The boundary condition — Inviting is fine; applying pressure is a different behavior
None of this means “keep asking until they surrender.”
A reasonable operating policy is:
- Make one light, concrete invitation.
- Do not catastrophize a decline.
- See whether they offer another date or engage next time.
- If vague declines or silence repeat, back off.
“People may care less about declining than we fear” and “I may ignore repeated refusals” are completely different propositions.
Likewise, an accepted invitation does not mean the person was secretly waiting desperately for you. The useful middle category is enough:
“I would not have organized it myself, but I’m happy you asked.”
Conclusion — Deploying “sometime” to production works more often than expected
You do not need to treat every “we should hang out” as a binding contract. But you also do not need to garbage-collect every one as meaningless social noise.
People can appreciate outreach more than expected, underestimate how much others like them, want contact without initiating it, exaggerate the damage of saying no, use ambiguous replies more than inviters prefer, and infer exclusion from silence.
The smallest viable implementation may simply be:
“We should go sometime.” → “Okay, how about next week?”
If they decline, say “No worries, another time.” If they offer another date, proceed. If everything repeatedly dissolves into vagueness, stop pushing.
Sometimes the social network is not short on goodwill. Nobody has pressed Confirm on the calendar.
Sources
- Liu, P. J., Rim, S., Min, L., & Min, K. E. (2023). The surprise of reaching out: Appreciated more than we think. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 124(4), 754–771. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000402
- Boothby, E. J., Cooney, G., Sandstrom, G. M., & Clark, M. S. (2018). The Liking Gap in Conversations: Do People Like Us More Than We Think? Psychological Science, 29(11), 1742–1756. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797618783714
- Aknin, L. B., & Sandstrom, G. M. (2024). People are surprisingly hesitant to reach out to old friends. Communications Psychology, 2, 34. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-024-00075-8
- Givi, J., & Kirk, C. P. (2024). Saying no: The negative ramifications from invitation declines are less severe than we think. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 126(6), 1103–1115. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000443
- Givi, J., Grossman, D. M., Kirk, C. P., & Sedikides, C. (2026). Self-Invitation Hesitation: How and Why People Fail to Ask to Join the Plans of Others. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 52(6), 1613–1626. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672251324232
- Givi, J., Kirk, C. P., Grossman, D. M., & Sedikides, C. (2025). Maybe don't say “maybe”: How and why invitees fail to realize that they should not respond to invitations with a “maybe”. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 121, 104814. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2025.104814
