The death of chivalry? Men aren’t paying for dates anymore
DEAR VEXED: I am confused. As a recently single woman, I’ve been dating quite a lot. Seven out of ten times the man doesn’t pick up the tab on the first date. Is this because they’re chumps or because they don’t know if I’ll see it as infringement on my feminine liberation? Marsha, 29, human resources
WHAT a pertinent question you ask. It gets not just at questions of etiquette but at the wider issue about male identity today which is, indeed, rather confused. This particular change seems to have happened quickly – or at least in the last five years. Most women I know still prefer or would expect a date to pick up the tab at least on the first night out. But men have stopped doing so. Or rather, it’s touch and go whether they will or not. Until quite recently you could count on a firm offer to pay and if one wasn’t forthcoming, discard the man without a second thought.
Now it’s less clear cut who is a keeper and who is a stingy, ungentlemanly cretin. Because some of the most promising men I’ve met allow a splitting of payment at the end of a round of drinks (I always offer, as do most women.)
My instinct is to hurl mental abuse at such specimens. But look at the man’s position. Women have taken offense (and rightly so) at so many formerly accepted features of gender relations – men discriminating against women at work, men refusing to take our professional ambition seriously, focusing on physical our appearance – that they may worry that paying for us will offend us too. A gentlemanly colleague of mine told me that, having been trained to be a polite holding-door-open type of man, he once held the door for his first boss, a woman, and received a burst of vitriol. And it is confusing: how can we want feminism on one hand and to be paid for on the other?
Well, we do, and we can have both. Because we’re not saying the man should always pay. But it is a vestige of an old code of manners that – while generally based on ideas that were ideologically odious where women were concerned – did have a thousand times more surface gentility than anything we have today.
So when a man insists on paying today, it’s not just romantic and lovely, it’s polite. Men that see it as an infringement on womanhood – and the women that agree – are getting the wrong end of the stick. My advice? Find a guy happy to buy you dinner, no matter how much you each earn. [email protected]