Who should pay on a first date?
In the Dating Diaries, the weekly Toronto Star column I created where anonymous Torontonians tell me about their best, worst and weirdest dates, certain themes emerge on the regular. The most persistent theme comes, almost exclusively, from hetero daters: men say that women expect too much; women say that men don’t make enough of an effort. Where these complaints most often meet, like two muddy streams flowing into a sad, gross river, is on the issue of who pays for a date.
It comes up the most, for women, when men don’t offer to pay, even if she was ready to split the tab, even if she was about to insist, was palming her credit card while the bill was dropped. For them, it seems way less important that a guy actually pays for something than it is for him to want to pay for it. It comes up for men when women let them pay for one thing, like dinner — or, let them pay without offering — and don’t pay for the next thing, like the tip, or coffee and dessert, or a movie, or parking.
Dating involves all the primal hot-potatoes, like sex, gender and money — and the sociocultural experiences that inform what all of that means to anyone who is just looking to find someone nice — and when they come together it’s more revealing than a bored Friday night’s worth of online-dating profiles. As a mediation and testing ground, “who pays” is on par with handshakes and flirting.
Another person’s money behaviour on a date can be a mood-ruiner and dealbreaker or a point in their favour when they slip a card to the bartender while you’re texting friends in the bathroom, or when they overtip, but quietly. Money is such an immediate, tangible way to make sense of a stranger and their values; instead of admitting it to each other, though, it’s usually driven by secret and unpredictable and conflicting expectations of what is right, what is “done,” and what you need to feel seen and comfortable.
Holding tight to money rules on dates seems counterproductive to Smug Marrieds who clock the ways our single friends self-sabotage, without necessarily remembering when we did the very same things. But, being kind of intense about how money should work is one of the few ways a dater can control an uncontrollable situation, mitigating the potential rejection and emotional burn of the endeavour. Money stuff is never about “money,” anyway.
Straight people who are committed to the idea of “the man” paying for “the woman” could benefit from considering that when heterosexuality, and more to the point, heteronormativity, are excised from the dating equation, everyone still manages to eat something, and the first-date superstructure doesn’t collapse. But, obviously, the enduring idea that men “should” pay for dates didn’t spring from some isolated sexism; aside from it being a familiar dating standard from, I guess, forever, women are still paid less than men for the same work, and still pay exponentially more for the accoutrements of dating, from clothes to grooming to birth control to late-night Uber rides. (This doesn’t include the other costs of dating, which are also much more “expensive” for women: emotional labour, physical risk, time spent.)
The agreement that the asker pays for the asked-out, if we ever really had it, was made irrelevant with online dating, when swipes on a smartphone lead to an implied date, without one person “asking” in a proprosal kind of way. The only actually correct answer is for everyone to pay for themselves, but that can be an eye-roll for a server, and doesn’t unknot the many scenarios when money intrudes in different ways, like pre-paid concert tickets or cooking for someone, and when being paid for on a first date is cool because then you can throw down, hard, on the second, as a kind of generosity high-five.
My forever-take is that most dates would be better if they cost nothing, or almost: not for me the arms-length audition of the coffee date as preamble to a real date. (I was not an online dater, but if someone had offered me the afternoon coffee-shop meet-up, I would bounce from that hedged bet like a bunny.) A long walk or park hang and some takeout coffee — the lowest-common denominator of paying for something alongside someone else — serves the same purpose, not only of money but love and dating and vulnerability and togetherness, better.