Ask to join someone else’s family dinner.
Same as the other thing: this is a hard no for me. You don’t invite yourself into someone’s meal except for the rarest of reasons with the best of friends/relatives. For one thing, you are obligating your friend to finance your meal and some people could actually find that difficult.
Not to mention it’s just intrusive. It is true that meals are great bonding things; it is why I have done family dinner nearly every night for my kids’ entire growing up years. But the reason I have protected meals is so that I bond to my family, not so random friends can disrupt that.
BTW, someone did try to do this to me; they tried to invite themselves to my pizza night tradition. I laughed it off as if I thought they were not serious. I made a joke about it being a sacred tradition, haha. But I think they really meant to barge in on my pizza tradition. 🙄
