You ask a girl out on a date. After dinner, the check comes. You go to pay. Politeness requires that she ask if she can pay for half. Politeness also requires you to insist that you pay for it all, because you asked HER out on the date. She thanks you, and you both continue with the date.
Basic etiquette, not just for dates.
If your supervisor, invites you to have lunch at a restaurant. He goes to pay. You have to offer to pay for your half.
If he did a 180, and took you up on your polite, token offer, you would be pissed too.
But I think you might be misreading the situation a little. We are interested in who you are. We want to know everything about you. We want to know your hopes and dreams and ambitions and loves and hates and fears. There is nothing about you we don’t want to know. And we figure that of all the things we want to know about you, we might as well, you know, start with, say, what color panties you’re wearing right now.
If the relationship works out in the long term, we’ll learn the rest of that other crap soon enough.
Anyway, I would do as you say, but I’ve tried that before, and sometimes it just blew up in my face. I’ve had women get very upset that I insisted on paying, as if I were some sort of sexist troglodyte trying to “own” them or something.
And this is at the heart of the problem – women aren’t consistant with this (as you’d expect in any varied population, not all women are alike, of course). This wouldn’t be a problem if I could successfully predict how any given woman will react, but my predictions have a bad track record.
I realize that the unwritten dating rule is for the woman to fake-pay, but it may well be that the last five women the man dated were using a different rulebook.
I think a much better response would be “Thanks, I’ll get it next time.” This assures the man that a) You are grateful, b) You’re not a gold digger, and c) There’s going to be a next time. Win/win.
If you don’t plan on there being a next time, pay half and don’t complain about it.
I’d like to share something with June. It’s something I’ve concluded over the years, and he may find it helpful.
Men are attracted to the magnitude of a woman’s looks; women are attracted to the type of a man’s looks.
Example: if a woman tells you she likes tall, thin blond guys, and you introduce her to a very attractive guy who is none of those things, she will likely respond, “He’s attractive,… but not my type”.
Whereas, if a man says he likes tall, thin blondes, and you introduce him to a really attractive girl who is none of those things, he will likely flip over her. Remind him of his stated preference, and he will likely reply, “Yeah,… but look at her!”
Once I realized this, I quit assuming I wasn’t attractive enough, or that something was ‘wrong’ with me, when a woman turned me down. I simply asked another woman out, until I found one who seemed to prefer my ‘type’ enough to say yes.
Actually, what men get out of the traditional model of dating is an optimal pairing for themselves at the expense of a pessimal pairing for women.
Although it might seem counter-intuitive, pairing up mates based on a system of one group always initiating contact and the other will greatly favor the asking group. Professor Stephen Rudich at CMU has a lecture on an iterative dating process called the Traditional Marriage Algorithm that demonstrates this. Unfortunately, I can’t find a good explanation of it anywhere. If people are interested, I’ll try to rederive it.
See, I could have written the exact opposite rant (or, the same rant with the gender pronouns reversed).
In my dating days, I was the aggressor in most of my relationships. I think the men involved were so afraid of rejection, or so afraid of coming across as jerks, that they not only wouldn’t ask me out, but wouldn’t indicate any sexual interest for fear of being too aggressive, nor would they recognize my interest in them (perhaps because they were trying so hard not to be assholes?).
Really irritating, I’ll add. I was well and truly sick of doing all the asking.
The result was a catch-22 situation, in that the first time a guy actually expressed unprompted interest in me, I was so impressed that I was totally all over him. Of course, the only guys who expressed unprompted interest me were raging assholes, because the non-RAs figured that showing unprompted interest would indicate that they were RAs.
Problem is, I don’t really see any way out of it … a lot of wo/men are assholes, and I can totally understand having the desire to not come across as one but not having any idea how. Combine this with differing expectations and needs, and, oh boy … say what you like about arranged marriages, but I can certainly understand that they would prevent quite a lot of trouble.
You and I have two very different ideas of what a successful date is. You seem to think the point of dating is to have every date go well. The point of dating is finding the person you’re compatible with, and the ‘bad’ ones tell more about your compatibility that the ‘good’ ones.
In the quoted, text above you seem to be showing what you consider a bad date. That is a good date. You were able to find out right off the bat, that any chivalrous act on your part will be misinterpreted. Would you rather she have told you after fifteen dinner dates that she thought you constantly picking up the check was sexist?
I’ve read that it doesn’t really work that way. What I’ve read is that really it’s women who do all of the choosing, and in doing so they send out signals that get men to do the asking, and think that it was their idea in the first place.
Then again, I read it in some self-help how-to pop psychology book, so give it all the credence it deserves.
In the simplest model, it does work out that way. Perhaps that model isn’t a perfect fit for the real world, but that’s a separate issue.
On the other hand, you could take the stable marriage result to mean that you’ll have your best shot of landing the woman you want if you ask out every woman you’re interested in, no matter the signals.
I couldn’t agree with this more. Although I don’t know it I would call it choosing on the womans part per say, but rather puting out the signals and hoping she’ll get asked out.
Problem with us guys is we don’t pick up on these signals. Im sure more than one woman will agree with this. Which is why I’ve learned to go with my “gut” instinct when I comes to asking a woman out. Which may not sound very logical but there is some science to it. (which I’m too lazy to go into details right now) And sometimes even still I miss the boat completely.
What really concerns me about my fellow male friends is this whole fear of rejection thing. Guys, for those of you who don’t know already; rejections are like battle scars. Don’t get all depressed because you got turned down, but rather be PROUD of yourself for having the moxie to ask her out in the first place!
I mean hell, I look at it this way. If I had half the chance, I’d ask Carmen Electra out on a date. She would of course turn me down because I’m just a “nobody” from where she’s standing. But how great would it be to brag to all my friends: “Dude! I TOTALY got turned down by Carmen Electra!”
“You go SHAKES!, You go my friend!” slaps high five
Speaking as someone who has asked out a fair number of geekboys, I’d like to take issue with that “Oh, sure”.
The geekboys I’ve asked out in my life have all responded with some equivalent of, “Uh, hmmm. You know, I hadn’t thought to run the evaluation process to determine whether or not I find you attractive. Give me a moment to find the code for that. . . I’m sure it’s around here somewhere . . .”
Well, yes, okay, that’s fair. You’re running into a combination of two factors there, I betcha. One, we overthink. We overthink everything. Some of us have trouble falling asleep at night because our brains won’t shut up for five seconds - and even trivial, obvious decisions will be carefully considered.
Two, clearly, we’re not used to getting asked out, so there’s a bit of a mental stun there.
A few of us have learned the lesson of Ghostbusters, though. When someone asks you if you’d like to go on a date, or if you’re a God, you say “Yes!”.
I’ve asked two guys out in my life, and both of them ran for the hills.
Now I know I wasn’t unattractive at either time. Other guys were interested. Apparently the boys I think to ask are still stuck in 1902.
One of them I knew in college. He and I took long walks together, spent a lot of time together, studied together, before I asked him if he wanted to “go out together sometime,” is what I think I said. I was nineteen.
He gave me the weirdest excuse, I don’t know what to make of it to this day. He told me he was already engaged - to a 40 year old woman in Japan. I mean, come on? Is this for real? I would have accepted a “I have a girl back home” excuse, but that was just weird. So weird it might even be true.
Based on a couple of news reports I’ve heard about proposals to open up women’s colleges to males, and the ensuant protests from the all-female student bodies, I can only say that men and women must be very different. No 18 - 22 year old straight men anywhere will ever, ever raise the slightest objection to having women in their midst. But women the same age seem perfectly capable of saying things to the effect that the presence of male students will be distracting, or otherwise detrimental to their educational persuits. Heck, my love life during college was utterly abysmal, but at least I got to look. And I enjoyed looking.
