The age-old question of who should pay the bill on a first date has been discussed ad nauseam by seemingly every out-of-touch dating expert, shock-value podcaster and half-witted Redditor on the internet.
However, we’ve noticed the student perspective on this question is largely absent. And as much as we urge you to not take dating advice from a team of editors at The Brown and White, we wanted to provide some insight into college students view paying for the first date.
After all, it can’t be any worse than taking dating advice from a Redditor.
More often than not, the first-date discussion functions in the heteronormative framework of a date between a man and a woman, and completely ignores queer and nontraditional relationships for the sake of simplicity.
It’s a ridiculous and short-sighted view of relationship culture, but we wanted to see if we could find some common ground while discussing traditional relationships that we could apply to the broader dating landscape.
At our weekly Editorial Board meeting, we went around the room and asked each editor who they thought should be responsible for the bill on the first date. Two schools of thought prevailed: either the person who asked the other on the date should pay, or, the man should pay.
The former works on the basis that if someone takes the initiative to ask the other out, it is then their responsibility to foot the bill. It was their idea to go out on a date after all, so the financial burden should fall on them.
The latter, however, is based on the social expectations of the beauty standards and practices women must follow to look “presentable” for the date. Women spend significantly more time and money on makeup, hair, nails and fashion in preparation for the date, so the man should reciprocate that time and money by picking up the check.
We then asked how our answers would change if one person in the relationship was significantly older than the other or if they made considerably more money.
Some of us reframed our answers around the new context of age and finances, while others backed their previous answers with a few addendums. A few of us took back our answers from earlier and waited for more context.
It went on like this for another 45 minutes.
We kept going around adding more context to this hypothetical situation, providing opportunities for more nuanced answers, adding addendum after addendum, going back on previous answers and talking our way in circles until we eventually ran out of steam.
And after all the layers of context we added and all the possible situations we considered, we finally crafted the mathematically correct, peer-reviewed, editor-approved “Golden Rule” for who should pay for the first date.
Just kidding. Of course, we didn’t.
By the time we had come close to addressing about half of the factors necessary to decide who should pay for the bill, our answers had been vastly different from the answers we had come up with in the beginning.
It’s ridiculous to think you can come up with a rule that applies to every first date without the layers of context that inform the financial and personal dynamics of each relationship.
First dates can be some of the most chaotic, lawless and awkward social situations a person can put themselves in. So there’s no use in trying to create a strict set of standards for something so nuanced.
One thing we all agreed on during our discussion, was how caught off guard we would be if our hypothetical suitor brought up the concept of who should pay for the date, during the date.
It’s not traditionally polite to discuss something as sensitive as personal finances during a first date, but maybe we ought to be more open-minded when it comes to these conversations.
Sure, it might be bold or a little unorthodox to talk about who should pay for the first date while you’re on the first date. But if the subject can be broached gracefully and without too much pressure, it could be an interesting way to get a better sense of how the other person views relationships.
As a generation, maybe it’s time to start challenging each other to be more open and less judgmental about the kind of dynamics we want to see in our relationship. Not simply the kind of dynamics that we are told we should have.
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