To be fair, deep strategy games aren't exactly the most friendly thing to just "dip your toe into", especially two player deep strategy.

If you wanted more chances for people to come over and play games few things could be worse. Maybe 18xx (very crunchy simulationist games about early railways) or full blown scale wargaming (e.g. Napoleonic). But even lighter variants of those let people ease into it (e.g. skirmish wargaming, you can buy a couple of boxes of miniatures and play skirmish variants of 40K or various WW2 settings, and there are train sim games where you just run trains and don't have a stock market, a territorial map and so on)

I know I won't have people over often enough to justify big set piece games, so I carry things like "Love Letter" which you can play in a pub in 10 minutes.

That is very fair assessment that I also share. That is why I have other games. But I do lament it!

For the most part, I get my gaming in by playing with people using play-by-post in a Pathfinder roleplaying forum, which I like alot for the creative writing and rp.

I've had the same problem. Then I got married, and my oldest son is now 9, and we played Terraforming Mars this weekend and he loves it.

It takes a bit of time and investment, but there is a way out.