If someone lives near me, and I decide I'd like to spend some time with them, my usual approach is to invite them over for dinner. It's fairly clear that this is the polite thing to do whereas attempting to invite myself to theirs would be rude, and it's fairly clear that this is because the host is the one who does all the work: extra cooking, making the place respectable beforehand, washing up afterwards etc. So volunteering to make all that effort myself is polite, whereas trying to manoeuvre the other person into doing it is rude.

All of that is well known and uncontroversial. But how, if at all, does the picture change when the person in question lives sufficiently far away that travelling there and back is liable to be at least as much effort and hassle as the duties of the host?

I find I can't quite make a case either way which convinces me. I would feel a bit rude inviting someone to dinner if accepting the invitation necessarily involved them sitting on trains or in traffic jams for longer than I expected to spend cooking, and yet I would also feel just as rude inviting myself to have dinner with them so that they had all the hosting responsibilities. Neither seems to me to be the obviously more polite option.

Currently, my best solution is to issue an either-way invitation. ‘I'd like to have dinner with you, how about it? If so, your city or mine?’ But that doesn't really seem ideal to me either: it's long, unwieldy, and has a nervous, talking-too-much, downright Hugh Grant vibe to it which is rarely if ever what I want. What do other people do?

Perhaps such dinners should always be held in complementary pairs: home and away.