I meet my friend D for coffee. He’s handsome, mid-thirties, Italian; dating.
‘How’s the love life?’ I ask. He shrugs. ‘I am seeing this girl, very beautiful,’ he says. ‘She likes me, I can tell.’ ‘But?’ I say, because there clearly is one. ‘But she never pay!’
D explains he’d taken her out the evening before. They’d had pre-dinner drinks. He paid. They’d had dinner. He paid. ‘Then, she invite me for cocktails. I say, “OK!” I thought: she invites me, she’s gonna pay!’
‘But you paid?’
‘But I paid. She didn’t say, “Let me.” She didn’t even...’ he mimes reaching for a wallet. I have heard this before, from D, who is not wealthy, btw; from other single male friends. One – also mid-thirties, smart, evolved – had been flabbergasted when he’d taken a Bumble date to the pub and she hadn’t got a single round in. ‘She just... sat there,’ he said.
This appears to be the way of things with modern dating. The dude pays. Then he pays some more. Then he pays again.
‘Damn right, he pays!’ said a female Instagram influencer. ‘I’m gonna have his future babies!’ The Likes and Hell yeahs! accumulated, while I thought, sorry, what? I mean, I understand that, on having a man’s baby, on enduring pregnancy, the astounding rigours of labour, on nurturing a newborn, a woman is entitled to financial support from the person whose body hasn’t just produced a miracle... But in advance of that? Are you kidding me? ‘They have to pay!’ another (smart) 30-something female friend explained. ‘We have to get our nails done, our hair done, get waxed!’ ‘No, you don’t!’
I said. ‘You don’t get it,’ she sighed.
But I do. I am of the generation of women for whom paying for yourself was a privilege. A point of pride. The generation whose mothers only got bank accounts in their own name – not their husband’s – in 1975. Admittedly, my generation didn’t date, we just: got drunk, went home with someone, then (assuming neither one of you did a runner before dawn) congrats! You were boyfriend and girlfriend!
But still! We thought to be paid for by a man was cringe. Regressive. Infantilising. What were we? Ickle baby girl princesses whose only measure of self-worth was how enthusiastically some bloke slapped down his card to pay for our Fiorentina? Apart from anything else: where might that leave future generations of women? The ones fighting the pervasive influence of online misogynists whose principle argument for treating women as prey, as property, as disposable, interchangeable, grabbable, slappable less-than-humans is, ‘All any woman wants is some man who’ll pay for her, anyway’?