For Gen Z, an age-old question: Who pays for dates?
During a recent dinner at a cozy bar in Manhattan, I was confronted with an age-old question about gender norms. Over bowls of ramen and sips of gin cocktails, my date and I got into a debate: Who should pay for dates?
My date, a 27-year-old woman I matched with on Hinge, said gender equality doesn’t mean men and women should pay the same when they go out. Women, she said, earn less than men in the workplace, spend more time getting ready for outings and pay more for reproductive care.
When the date ended, we split the bill. But our discussion was emblematic of a tension in modern dating. At work and on social media, where young people spend much of their personal time, they like to emphasize equity and equality. When it comes to romance and courtship, young people — specifically women and men in heterosexual relationships — seem to be following the same dating rules their parents and older generations grew up learning.
Contemporary research, popular culture and conversations I had with more than a dozen young Americans suggest that a long-standing norm still holds true: Men tend to foot the bill more than women do on dates. And there seems to be an expectation that they should.
The ‘paying for the first date’ dance
Some progressive defenders of the norm cite the persistent gender wage gap, the fact that women pay more for reproductive products and apparel than men, and the greater amount of time women spend preparing for dates to comport with societal norms.
Kala Lundahl lives in New York and works at a recruiting firm. She typically matches with people for dates through apps like Hinge, with the total cost of the date, usually over drinks, coming to around $80. On the first date, Lundahl, 24, always offers to split the check but expects the man to pay — and has encountered resistance when she offers to pay.
Lundahl said that if the date is going well, they might continue on to a second location, usually a cheaper place where she is more likely to pay. On a second date, she said, she would be more insistent on paying the entire check, or splitting it. Lundahl’s reasoning comes from her belief that the person who did the asking out — usually the man — should pay for the date, and that the person who makes more money — also usually the man — should cough up.
“A couple of guys get a little stiff when I offer to pay,” Lundahl said. “You can tell they’re not comfortable with that idea.”
Scott Bowen, a 24-year-old accountant in Charlotte, North Carolina, said he always pays for drinks, meals and coffees on dates. Usually that winds up being $70 to $100 per outing. The conversation over who pays usually lasts a split second — from the time the waiter sets down the check to when Bowen reaches over and says, “I’ll grab that,” he said.
When Bowen was growing up, his parents made it clear to him that he should pay for dates. He acknowledged that he wanted to see the status quo changed to be more of an even split, yet he said he was uncomfortable bringing up the subject during dates: Our conversation was one of the rare times he had spoken about the issue with another person.
In LGBTQ relationships, who pays for dates has less to do with gender norms and more with specific relationship dynamics.
Brendan Foley, a government worker in Washington, D.C., said that in his experience dating men, the check was usually split. When one person paid, it was often the older man, or the person who was understood to make more money. But the discussion of money during dates doesn’t bother him.
“I think there are more honest and straightforward conversations than the dance in straight relationships,” Foley, 24, said.
The persistent tradition of men paying
Shanhong Luo, a professor at Fayetteville State University, studies the factors behind attraction between romantic partners, including the norms that govern relationships. In a paper published in 2023 in Psychological Reports, a peer-reviewed journal, Luo and a team of researchers surveyed 552 heterosexual college students in Wilmington, North Carolina, and asked them whether they expected men or women to pay for dates — and whether they, as a man or a woman, typically paid more.
The researchers found that young men paid for all or most of the dates around 90% of the time, while women paid only about 2% (they split the cost around 8% of the time). On subsequent dates, splitting the check was more common, though men still paid a majority of the time while women rarely did. Nearly 80% of men expected that they would pay on the first date, while just over half of women (55%) expected men to pay.