Poking around Role/Reboot yesterday, I came across Hugo Schwyzer and Emily Heist Moss’s debate “Who Pays?”, which asked if men should foot the bill on a first date. In responding “yes,” Schwyzer explains that because men, on average, make more money than women it is appropriate for the man to pay. I found his reasoning to be interesting; I had never encountered this logic before. However, I got to wondering if this answer was applicable to me. Who pays on a first date is much less about gender for people my age – twenty-something recent college graduates – because none of us have any money.
Most of my friends are unemployed, underemployed, or working for close to minimum wage. Questions of “who pays for what” extend to almost every aspect of life – dating and relationships, friendships, and family life. Who pays for a date? Who gets this round of beers? Should my mom be buying socks and shampoo for me – a 22 year-old part-time employed college graduate? My friends who are trying to scrape together monthly student loan payments without jobs aren’t going to be asked to pitch in for gas money on a road trip, nor am I going to ask them to bring the burgers for a cookout. The recession has created this whole new landscape of who-pays-for-what/unemployment politics that I have never experienced.
I was a sophomore in college when the housing market bubble popped and the stock market crashed. In the coming months and years the cost of living increased, jobs became harder to come by, and the nice little nest egg I had built for myself got smaller and smaller. In high school, going on a date often meant dinner and a movie, a day trip to Boston, or a concert. Through the better part of college, my dates mostly involved meeting at the dining hall, going to a free university-sponsored event, or eating popsicles and watching Netflix. Somehow my twenties are turning out to be far less glamorous than my teens.
I almost always split the bill with dates in high school. In fact, I remember once getting into a rather boisterous argument in an IHOP over this point. At that time, I just assumed splitting the bill would always be the norm –after all, this the 21st century and I have never sought to model myself after June Cleaver. However, in the brave new “post”-recession world, “who pays?” isn’t as simple as that. As often as possible, college dates were free or close to free. Who paid for a date was a question of who just got a birthday check from grandma or a reimbursement from a student loan (both things my friends and I liked to refer to as stimulus packages).
Sure, on the macro level it is obvious that men generally make more money than women for doing the same work. On the micro level of my peer group, however, this lack of money does not discriminate. If I were on a date with someone who had a well-paying full-time job I would not feel too weird about letting him get it. If I’m on a date with an unemployed guy, it’s as likely he has a B.A., a beard, and a penchant for discussing existentialism (swoon!) as it is he’s living on a couch and doesn’t have any goals. Having entered the job market in the midst of the Great Recession unemployment isn’t a mark of shame so much as a fact of life for Millennials.
I would assume that as the economy (eventually) enters recovery for Millennials — a group hit hard by the recession — my feelings about this will change. I certainly wouldn’t ask a date for a copy of his taxes before deciding who was going to get the bill if we were both employed. In high school I always split the bill with dates and friends, though the days of no bills and lucrative paid internships are long gone.
As a white, straight, middle class female I certainly can’t speak for everyone. The issue becomes more faceted when considering the dating lives and relationships of same sex couples and those people whose genders lay outside of the male/female binary. One thing, however, is certain: For young people today, the question of who pays on the first date is significantly more complicated than what’s going on under your clothes.
Kaitlyn Dowling recently graduated summa cum laude from the University of New Hampshire with a B.A. in political science. Her (mostly unpaid) work has focused on field and community organizing, political communication, and digital strategy. In her spare time, Kaitlyn enjoys writing creative non-fiction and tweeting about state politics and her desire to own a chihuahua.
Photo credit zizzybaloobah/Flickr