2HF said:
If you get set up on a blind date or just ask a girl out and then have a terrible date do you still pay for the whole thing?
Like I mean you both know that it is going poorly and you both know that there will not be a second date. Do you still feel obligated to pay?
Well, I've been happily married for 5 years now, but when I was single I flat out refused to date women who lacked the self-respect to be self-sufficient. For that matter, I've always refused to date women who aren't feminists - I consider myself an intelligent and confident guy, and I expect my partners (whether male or female) to be equally self-sufficient.
So, there's a good chance that I wouldn't pay, because we'd already be going dutch.
I would pay if it was something that was very much 'my' thing - say if I had asked her to come to the theatre to see a play that I was interested in. In that event, I figure that I'm the one inviting her, so I'm happy to pay for it. It isn't the money issue, but rather the kind of women who are attracted to that sort of thing. I'm just not likely to be interested in, or get on that well with, a woman who has traditional ideas of gender roles (being an openly bisexual marxist and all...) so it's better just to filter out the ones like that, rather than playing along when the chances of me being interested are minimal.
Not saying that I don't pay if I'm taking my wife out for dinner for her birthday or similar, and the same applied when I was single. Then again, she earns more than I do (as did most of my girlfriends over the years). I just don't like the idea of someone dating me because they want to be impressed in material ways. When I was single I even used to avoid telling dates that I was a lawyer (was then, am a uni professor these days), just to screen out anyone that was going out with me for my job.