Jennifer Singh in Vaughan, Ont. on Tuesday.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
When Jennifer Singh was dating in her 20s, she believed in splitting the tab. She was raised to be a financially independent woman, and going Dutch on a date embodied that.
But her mindset has since changed. While she’s recently separated and not yet jumping back into the dating pool, she knows what she wants when she starts dating again.
Men make more money than women, on average, said Ms. Singh, a 45-year-old business owner in Vaughan, Ont. Women also spend more time, effort and money to get ready for a date, she said, pointing to the cost of hair and other personal care products.
“It’s fair [for them] to pay for a date. It’s not unreasonable,” she said. Ms. Singh said she also sees men paying as demonstrating what they’re bringing to the table in a potential relationship, given that many women are highly educated, financially independent and working on themselves.
Online and in group chats, daters are revisiting the age-old question of who should pay on dates – and drifting back to traditional gender norms. Some modern daters are highlighting the gender wage gap and “beauty tax” – a term for the extra costs women pay to meet societal standards for beauty – as reasons for men to foot the bill in heterosexual dating.
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Laura Hammond, a 44-year-old fractional human resources leader in Ottawa, said the “running cost” of getting ready for dates is real: She estimated she spends $70 to $80 a month on her nails, and $300 every four to five months on hair cuts and getting her highlights done.
Ms. Hammond said she used to pro-actively offer to split the bill on first dates. Now, she tends to let her date take the lead. But she said she does generally take an “equitable” approach to paying for dates. She recently started seeing someone new; after he planned a “very nice” first date and paid for both of them, she reciprocated the gesture on their second date.
“I appreciated that he wanted to treat me [on the first date] and I wanted to signal my interest back to him,” she said. “If we’re to continue to date I want it to feel like an equal partnership.”
Expectations around who should pay for a date largely follow gender norms, according to a recent Simplii Financial survey of 1,500 Canadians aged 18 and older. Seventy-two per cent of men who weren’t in relationships said they’d expect to pay on a date, and 39 per cent of women said they would expect their date to pay. Daters were split on splitting: 47 per cent of women preferred it, compared to 23 per cent of men.
Respondents in relationships had similar responses, with 62 per cent of men saying they primarily pay and 36 per cent of women saying their partner primarily pays.
“Society is changing but some traditions still persist,” said Carissa Lucreziano, vice-president of financial planning and advice at CIBC. “The act of paying for a date, it’s not just about the money, it’s more about the values and the expectations around it.”
Mitch Hermansen, a 38-year-old fundraiser in Vancouver, said he considers it the “standard thing” to pay for a first date. “Probably it is some traditional masculinity norms, for sure, but I typically ask, so I’ll pay,” he said. Mr. Hermansen estimated he spent around $500 on dating in the past month.
On second and third dates, he said he’d usually offer to grab the bill, but appreciates if his date offers. He said that while he’s generally happy to pay for dates as a gesture, he doesn’t want it to fall solely to him.
“It probably wouldn’t be the relationship for me if I was expected to pay [for everything],” he said.
Damona Hoffman, a California-based relationship strategist and host of the Dates & Mates podcast, said she sees the conversation about who pays the bill as connected to the rise and recent fall of dating apps. When the apps took off midway through the last decade, the volume of first dates people were going on increased.
“That put a lot of stress on men who date women, particularly in shelling out a lot of money for dates that many times didn’t evolve in the same way they had prior to that point,” she said. “If you’re paying for it all, it changes the way that you show up.”
With seemingly infinite options, ghosting increased and so did the sense that dating was impersonal, Ms. Hoffman said.
“That’s the rise of, ‘Let’s go Dutch. We don’t know where this is going to go. Let’s meet in the middle here and not put too much effort, money or emphasis on what the outcome of this date will be and just see where it goes,’” she said. “That led to very transactional, very short-term, very dissatisfying dating.”
Ms. Hoffman said that at a moment when more daters are experiencing dating app fatigue, she sees the reversion to wanting men to pay for dates as a desire for intentional dating.
“It’s not about showing off your resources,” she said. “It’s about saying, ‘You’re choosing me. You’re not doing this every day of the week. You’re making an investment in building a relationship with me, specifically.”
But for Eden Osmar, a 30-year-old copywriter in Calgary, the sense that someone is making an investment is part of the reason why she generally prefers to split the bill.
Ms. Osmar said she appreciates when a man offers to pay for the date, and sometimes takes them up on it. But she doesn’t want “someone to invest their money on top of their time if it’s something I don’t see going anywhere.”
Ms. Hoffman noted that among LGBTQ+ daters, there are no set norms around who pays for a date, though sometimes the person who makes the initial ask pays the bill.
“Everybody wants to feel like they’re being chosen, and like someone is doing something nice for them and investing in time with them,” she said.
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