To pay or not to pay, it’s always the question
My dating days are long lapsed, as my wife informs me. But I still remember the experiences of my younger years when it was de rigueur for the man to pick up the tab for drinks, dinner, taxi, whatever.
Now, after 40 years of feminist re-education and, even assuming men still court women, I’ve come to understand this practice no longer applies, even in the earlier stages of courtship.
You can imagine my surprise then when I read about a new study indicating that, regardless of decades of social engineering and promotion of gender equality, men are still expected to whip out the wallet and pay the bill, especially on those first few dates.
Researchers at Chapman University in California (where else would they study such matters?), after examining the responses of 17,000 people between the ages of 18 and 65, have found that 84 per cent of men claimed to be the ones who paid the dating bill during the early stages of a relationship — even though, as the researchers noted, 64 per cent thought they shouldn’t be expected to do so.
Equally surprising, nearly 40 per cent of women secretly preferred that the man cough up the cash even when they offered to split the tab.
One of the researchers, David Frederick, says the study was aimed at understanding “why some gendered practices are more resistant to change than others.”
While few would argue against paying men and women the same for doing the same job, it seems that on the date scene, as Courtney Shea writes in a Globe and Mail article on the study, “gender disparity appears to be not just a reality but a romantic ideal, with the majority of women seeking Prince Charming over Larry Egalitary.” Good for those women, I say. Dating rituals are, or used to be, part and parcel of how men and women acquired mates.
Men, no surprise, had high hopes for sex at some point. Like a peacock spreading his brightly-coloured feathers to an uncertain female, picking up the tab was a coded way for an man to indicate his worthiness as a sexual partner and, possibly, as a mate. It was certainly more socially acceptable than taking off your clothes in a restaurant and displaying your, uh, plumage.
The instincts of women appear to run a little deeper, or so I’ve been taught to believe. At some perhaps unconscious level, women may be looking for a mate in whom they can have some confidence that he’ll be there when they are at their most vulnerable; that is to say, when they are pregnant or raising young children.
In this regard, the Chapman University study points to much wider issues than it purports to examine.
At least one of Shea’s interviewees recognizes this: “The majority of women I work with appreciate a man who can take charge, plan a date, and then pay for it,” says Sheree Morgan, a professional matchmaker in Vancouver.
This strikes me as an eminently reasonable attitude on the part of women. How a man handles money, whether he is generous or stingy, whether he willingly and without resentment picks up the tab; all these are clues to his character and how he might perform as a father, husband or life-partner.
A woman on a “serious” date — something more than a casual gathering of friends or a business lunch or an after-work drink — seeks insight into whether this man so intent on gaining her good regard with the aid of candlelight and a decent burgundy will stand by her when the date is just a memory.
And how a man responds to that bill inside the black folder waiters drop on the table is a clue to his competence as a caregiver when the wine bottles are empty and the candles long burnt out.
As Shea herself observes in commenting on the implications of the study: “Relationships that begin with the man paying the bill generally goon to become partnerships with a welldefined alpha/beta dynamic where the man is viewed as the provider.”
Now, having said all this, I must admit I have no idea if the dating rituals, monetary or otherwise, of the current generation fit this description or, if it is even an issue.
Do women pick up the tab or pay their share as regularly as men? My impression from observing young couples in bars and restaurants is that this is often the case, and, perhaps, rightly so.
The traditional men-pay-tab ethos was too often used to justify a man’s presumption of sex later in the evening. An egalitarian approach to the bar bill disallows such expectations.
Still, I wonder if the who-pays debate reflects more confusion than clarity about the mores of modern relationships between men and women.
If a date is an overture in the symphony of men and women together, then surely it helps to know the score.