TikTok can be a very silly place, what with all the dancing and memes—but then, every once in a while, a user will drop a piece of wisdom so profound that it can’t help but go viral. And that, my friends, brings us to the “90-Day Dinner.”
What exactly is the 90-Day Dinner?
Everything started back in Nov. 2023 when TikTok user @queer_quarterback, also known as Becca Havian, who is currently earning her master’s in mental health counseling, created a five-minute video clip explaining a mental health habit that had been forged in her friend group, called the “90-Day Dinner.” She also noted in the clip that the concept and name were coined by “a friend of a friend.”
The most basic conceit of the dinner is that, when you’re feeling down about where you are at a specific moment in your life, you set up a dinner 90 days in the future with your friends, family, or even just yourself, so that once those 90 days have passed, you can intentionally sit down and look back on just how far you’ve come in such a short time.
“Basically, what happens is—if one of us is feeling in a funk, if something really shitty has happened, if we find ourselves in a breakup or lost our job or it doesn’t even have to be that, it could just be like general anxiety or a feeling of stuckness—we can call a ’90-Day Dinner,’” Becca explained in the clip. “So, what happens is you text the group, you say: ‘Scheduling a 90-Day’ or something like that. And we all look at our calendars and go three months out and mark it in the calendar that it’s ‘Becky’s 90-Day Dinner.'”
What’s the point of the dinner?
Becca goes on to explain that the end goal is to “provide perspective” before going on to say, “So basically, at the time you’re calling the 90-Day Dinner, things are feeling bad. You’re like, ‘I can’t imagine a time when I’m not going to be feeling this way.’ And by the 90-Day Dinner, the idea is that something will have shifted.”
“Now, if you’re going through a breakup,” she continues, “In all likelihood, you’re going to still feel some type of way about your breakup. It’s not going to be night and day necessarily, but there will always be a shift of some kind. Either you’ll be able to see it from a new angle, there will be new information that’s been presented at that time, maybe another part of your life has begun to go really well, so you feel a little more removed from the intensity of the feelings you had when you called the 90-Day.”
After sharing the set-up and reasoning for the dinner, Becca goes on to explain that she loves this “tradition” her friend group has created, and that even though “it’s always a bummer” when one of her friends needs to call in the dinner, it’s still reaffirming that “the idea of emotional permanence is something that is really productive to shed.”
But why 90 days?
Becca also discusses why 90 days is the perfect length of time, as her friend group believes: “90 days is a weird paradox of time that feels simultaneously really long and really short. Most people show up to their 90-day and say, ‘I can’t believe it’s been 90 days! It feels like it’s been so much shorter or so much longer.'” It’s also possible to do this with long distance friends, as Becca notes, being that you can always have your 90-Day Dinner virtually via a platform like FaceTime.
Comments on the video skewed mostly positive, with one user stating, “God, I would love to be surrounded by people who are this intentional about friendship,” while another wrote, “I feel like even scheduling a 90-day dinner with yourself and getting the notification like, ‘Oh! It’s time to check in on myself, get my fave meal, and reflect.'”
90 Day Dinner’s impact
Becca spoke with the Daily Dot about the creation of the 90 Day Dinner, who told us that the response to her video “makes [her] heart sing.” “People have tagged me in videos of their 90 Day Dinners, often with a beautiful description of their experience in the caption,” she explained.
Becca has also received feedback IRL, saying, “Others in my personal life have texted me to share that they set a date for their own 90 Days with loved ones. It makes me emotional every time, because it’s proven to me that social media has the capacity to facilitate meaningful connection and mitigate isolation.”
Since her TikTok has gone viral, Becca, too, has called a 90 Day Dinner for herself. She explained, “I was going through a challenging interpersonal dynamic in the late Fall, and decided that it would be nice to look back on it with more perspective down the line, as a lesson to myself that feelings and circumstances are transient—they’re temporary.”
We asked about the friend who first kicked off the series to find out what event may have caused its creation. Becca explained, “The concept was originally developed by a friend of a friend, Sarah Fox Tracy, who deserves full credit for this novel idea. I know little about the impetus for its creation, but my friend suggested we implement the practice as a group when one of our pals was in the throes of a breakup, and it caught on from there.”
While the benefits of the dinner certainly don’t claim to be a cure-all for any mental health issues, it’s definitely a nice sentiment to pause for a moment and look back at how far you’ve come in such a short amount of time. It’s also a reminder that feeling stuck in one moment doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll feel that way forever.
This story has been updated with additional comments from the creator.
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