OK, I understand you now. It’s actually not a phenomenon, there have been no articles describing it, there is no term to describe it, and the real answer to my initial question is “It doesn’t exist. The concept may make you feel better about having been rejected, but it’s purely inside your mind that manipulative women deliberately go on dates solely for free food.”
This is the sort of extreme evo-psych “just so story” that tries to explain complex behavior in modern human societies by simplistic analogies with prehistoric or even non-human behavior.
It doesn’t take into account, for example, the difference between patterns of social and sexual behavior in different primates, such as bonobos and chimpanzees. It just cherry-picks a particular instance of primate behavior that can be interpreted as a parallel with a modern human social custom and says “there, this proves that this modern custom is due to innate biological tendencies.”
Unfortunately, that does happen a lot. Most of the people I’ve known who got into an MLM were selling it primarily because they liked the products and wanted a vendor discount, and the ones who weren’t gave it up when the fortune didn’t materialize.
As for the “Could she eat!” thing, I’ll never forget early in the relationship with an ex, and we went to Village Inn or some comparable “big box restaurant” and I ordered a skillet dinner (or whatever it was called). It was a “breakfast for dinner” thing and was a very heavy meal. He couldn’t believe it, because in the past, women usually ordered a little salad, that kind of thing. I replied, “It’s what I want” and I did eat it.
That seems like a rather… extreme reaction to my pointing out that there could be other explanations than the one you assumed had to be the case?
Just because a particular phenomenon exists (and I haven’t seen anybody in this thread denying that the practice of “dating for dinner” exists) doesn’t mean that it is automatically the correct explanation of every instance of observed behavior that might be consistent with it.
Does it have to be so all-or-nothing? Can’t it be the case that while some manipulative women do deliberately go on dates solely for free food, that might not automatically be the guaranteed explanation for every one of the situations where a friend of yours thought he and his date were having a real connection but she never followed up?
I mean, geez, bit touchy.
Or maybe he’s just bad at reading people.
Careful, you may be about to get stormed at by the OP for telling him that the phenomenon of “dating for dinner” doesn’t actually exist and there are no articles about it and the possibility of its existence is all inside his mind.
After all, if you point out that there could be alternative explanations of a particular incident, that’s exactly the same as denying that the proposed explanation could ever be valid at all.
This is the same kind of reaction we see so often when discussing potentially racist incidents. There’s a bunch of people who come up with lots of reasons why it might not be racism at play. Or that something similar happened to them, and all involved were the same race, so this might not be racism.
Lots of first dates never result in second dates. Lots of times one person on the date picks up the entire tab. There are going to be plenty of cases where there was never going to be a second date regardless of who paid. Everybody agrees that can happen. Sometimes two people of different ancestral backgrounds yell at each other, and it has absolutely nothing to do with racism.
The harsh reaction to the suggestion the friend didn’t experience D4D is because D4D was so quickly rejected. “Hey, my friend had some dates that fit the pattern.” “No, it wasn’t D4D, just bad dates.” Seems awfully dismissive of somebody else’s experience with very few facts.
“My friend lies on his dating profile, and uses a 15 year old picture, and is constantly getting ghosted after first dates, even after paying.” Yeah, maybe not D4D.
“My friend’s had plenty of bad first dates, but sometimes thinks they’re hitting it off really well, and then gets ghosted after paying. Usually my friend is better at reading the situation, and would have expected some followup communication after everyone seemed to have so much fun.” Sure, lots of other explanations, but D4D is certainly on the list.
I once asked an American: what exactly is a date? She replied it was any kind of meeting for any reason. She claimed that the romantic expectation thing was very much a product of Hollywood, and the publicists efforts to keep some romantic lead movie star in the public eye. They would make up stories about dates with other movie stars to delight the fan base.
This dating business seems full of rather dubious assumptions. Two honest people looking for a connection? Maybe…on a good day. Then the assumption that you can judge a persons character by how they eat their dinner? That is quite a stretch.
This contrived entertainment, to keep the audience entertained between movies, seems to have been transformed into a popular social ritual by which people are supposed to judge a potential partner as relationship material. It has been sold as a way of meeting a life partner by the match makers who have now found a huge new audience as a result of the Internet making communication easier with web profiles and the like.
It seems to result in a rather cruel exercise, somewhere between shopping and a job interview designed to weed out those who don’t qualify. Full of contrived rules, manners and protocols. It seems to be a something of a scam.
The winners are restaurateurs and reality TV producers and the purveyors of books on dating rules and techniques. Also the owners of those website with all their algorithms and monthly payment plans. As a form of entertainment, it may be amusing, but it should not be taken seriously. It is rather sad that people rely on such things to meet others when they are looking for a relationship.
In the UK, taking your dog for a walk in the local park is a sure fire way of meeting people. Just make sure it is friendly. In the park full of ladies with small cute small dogs looking for dates, your bad tempered Pit Bull may not be the wing man you were hoping for. A pocket full of dog biscuits can go a long way.
I see you got the memo: we’ll monetize absolutely anything and everything, even/particularly if it creates misery for the unfortunate few.
In the immortal words of George Carlin:
The whole revolution is about values. Values of any kind, y’know? What you’ll do for ten dollars; what you’ll do with ten dollars. It all comes down to values; what you value and how much. And, uh, I often think of that. 'Cause you can buy anything in this country. Businessmen are the ones who really, like, kinda got this country where it is in both ways, in both the positive and the negative, man. They did…the businessman. 'Cause there’s no morality in business. Just a ledger. Keep it in the black. Show a profit-( staccato ) Keep it in the black-keep it in the black. Never mind your soul. Never mind the landscape. Never mind the other guy. Keep it in the black-keep it in the black-do what you can-keep it in the black. BUSINESS AS USUAL GOING ON! Big plywood up there. BUSINESS AS USUAL! Businessman did it. That’s right. You can buy anything in this country. Anything you can think of! You can probably buy a left nostril inhaler if you look around long enough…With your state motto on it…Glows in the dark- anything, man. If you nail together two things that have never been nailed together before, some schmuck will buy it from you, man. “Yeah, give you a dollar and a half for that.” Yeah, anything at all.
[sorry for the slight hijack]
But nobody asserted that it wasn’t D4D, just that other explanations could also fit the facts.
And the racism comparison doesn’t seem very good because people in minoritized racial groups tend to get pretty good at detecting racism, even when it’s subtle. But very many people are notoriously bad at detecting whether other people really like them, even when the other person isn’t engaging in a deliberate and elaborate deceit for nefarious D4D purposes. So, y’know, suggesting alternative explanations isn’t particularly unreasonable or dismissive.
Kornelia
Kornelia says she comes from Eastern Europe and it is part of her culture that a man is expected to pay for everything.
That sounds about right. The social attitudes that prevailed in the former Soviet and Yugoslav states were about a generation behind those in the Western economies. Gender roles were and still are very fixed. Very conservativep. Men are in charge and women are expected to be decorative trophies. Like something out of the 1950s.
Clearly this attractive young woman can see the advantages for her and has nailed her flag to those values. She is a Melania looking for a Donald Trump, that is clear. Will she will find such a catch on TikTok? I got the impression it was for kids doing silly dance routines. But obviously there is a place for those with advanced cases of entitled Princesses syndrome to make clear their expectations.
Restaurant culture is interesting, couples go to such places at the beginning of relationships, for sure. They also go at end, presumably in the hope that such a public place will avoid dramatic arguments. The staff at my local restaurant have a table they refer to as the divorce table. Looking at the glowering expressions of any couple sitting there, you can see what they mean.
Lots of material for anthropologists.
And of course the nice thing about it now “making more sense” is it also soothes their bruised ego–most likely even in these cases the woman just wasn’t that into the man. But it’s a pleasant fiction for them to pretend they were being milked for a free dinner. Most women don’t feel obligated to go on a second date just because you shelled out for a nice meal and had a good rapport on date one, there’s plenty of reasons those things can occur and there still be no interest in pursuing it further. Also people’s barometers for judging “good rapport” and “mutual interest” are notoriously terrible.
You seem really committed to the idea that this phenomenon is incredibly widespread. I think this is probably a genuinely unusual phenomenon, and that most of the time regardless of the food and bill paying specifics, a lack of a second date is simply due to lack of mutual interest. Period.
I’ve been in a few very long-term relationships, but have never been married, and because of that have probably gone on more dates of this type than many people my age. I started dating in the 1970s, when frankly I would say 90% or so of women I met expected the man to simply pay for the entirety of the first date and expected the man to pick the restaurant. Many first dates didn’t become second dates. Sometimes that was because I decided not to call again, sometimes they declined a second date, and I don’t really expect that a plan for free food was much a part of it. Splitting the cost of a meal is much more common on first dates now, but plenty of traditionalist types the man might still pay for the first date, if someone isn’t comfortable with that they should make it understood before the check ever arrives.
Note how she herself spells it
Yes, but only gluons did this in the early universe. They’d randomly pop into existence, charm the quarks into a date then disappear before the check came.
Hence all the quarkyalones.
Isn’t part of D4D ghosting the dinner-buyer? That only started with cell phones with caller ID and texting, and is pretty affirmatively rude vs just declining a next date.
“Every time” is precisely what “needscoffee” said that I believe.
Fascinating, revealing distortions going on here.
You’ve got it almost precisely backwards. First place, other posters—not I—introduced the whole idea of D4D occurring “every” time as “my” explanation of why dates go bad. On the contrary, the scenario my OP introduced was of a group of male friends talking about weird dating experiences that they didn’t understand, and taking ALL of the responsibility for decades, in some cases, of a date gone wrong that they felt must have been their own faults, puzzling as it seemed that a woman who seemed to be enjoying herself (to the extent, at least, of wanting to extend the date by ordering more food and drink, which seemed at the time to be one sign of her having a good experience) ghosting him entirely, leaving followup phone calls or texts unanswered. But then another friend mentioned this social phenomenon, that he couldn’t remember the term for, that turned out, after my OP inquiring if anyone had ever heard of something like this, to be 1) a real thing, 2) with magazine articles describing it, 3) called variously “D4D” or “sneating” or other terms of art. The existence of this phenomenon served to make these guys understand that SOME of their ghosting experiences MIGHT be explained by this thing, and gave them SOME assurance that their dates gone inexplicably wrong MIGHT not be entirely their faults, though that was the conclusion they had drawn, for years or decades.
But sure, go ahead and make me the one with an agenda and a refusal to accept responsibility for my repulsiveness, because that’s what I’ve shown clearly in this thread.
Oh, then I’ll let you and needscoffee debate that, then. I mistakenly thought that your post #61 that followed swiftly on my post #60 was responding to me.