Discussion

Our data suggest there has been significant movement away from a monolithic cultural norm for dating and toward a more variable set of strategies and interactions. The data presented here support the notion that across age, income, and educational variations, many people’s behaviors—and more so their attitudes—are disrupting old gendered assumptions about “who pays,” and in that respect, those people seem to be attempting to undo gender, using Risman’s (2009) definition.

Finally, we are limited by only having reports of what people say they do with no way to judge their accuracy. In-depth interviews shortly after the paying for date interaction, conversational analysis, and ethnomethodogical approaches would be useful in helping our understanding of how people really think and talk about this issue and how the social interactions unfold.

Further limiting our understanding nuances involved in “sharing” expenses, women in this survey were asked if they “help pay,” signaling to them that paying is still seen by many as men’s primary responsibility. That phrasing for the item was selected by those with editorial control both because it’s how they perceived women really talk about this subject and also because they feared that if an item were worded, for example, “I always offer to pay, even on a first date,” there would be confusion about whether women were being asked if they were paying all expenses on a date or just a fair share . Their insistence on the “help pay” version of our items demonstrates how engrained these attitudes are. Try reversing any of our items, such as asking a woman to agree or disagree with the statement, “If I pay the bill, I think a man should engage in some sexual activity in return,” and the exercise drives home the point that we needed different questions for the sexes due to deeply entrenched gender standards in dating.

It would also be valuable if future research was able to systematically design a scale that assesses different aspects of dating scripts, with subscales assessing reported behaviors, reported preferences for men’s and women’s actions, and emotional reactions to dating norm violations. Lamentably, there was no space to explore variations in “sharing” expenses, or to learn more about the coincidence, or irrelevance, of the start of splitting expenses with declarations of dating exclusivity. Still, relative to some previous studies that relied on single items, we were able to assess various aspects of this dating interaction through multiple items measuring different attitudes and behaviors related to paying for dates.

Due to sharp restraints on the length of the survey, there were no data on traits such as political orientation, race/ethnicity, and religiosity. Assessing religiosity in future studies may be particularly important because religious attitudes and participation is linked to a wide variety of dating beliefs and practices ( Bartkowski, Xu, & Fondren, 2011 ; Brimeyer & Smith, 2012 ; Burdette, Ellison, Hill, & Glenn, 2009 ; Irby, 2014 ). It would also be valuable to assess whether greater gender equality at the local or nation level is related to attitudes about paying for dates (e.g., Do some European countries with more liberal attitudes toward gender, such as the Netherlands, endorse more egalitarian beliefs and practices when it comes to paying for dates?).

Nevertheless, these findings provide important clues to how people currently think about gendered exchanges when dating. Given that access to the Internet has grown remarkably in the last decade, the opportunity to participate in surveys such as this one is available to 95% of those between ages 18 and 29, 87% of those 30 to 49, 78% of those 50 to 64, and 42% of those 65 and older ( U.S. Census Bureau, 2012 ). Internet samples, including ours, tend to include a higher proportion of well-educated and higher income participants than the national population. This is probably less of a concern in this case given that income and education were generally unrelated to attitudes and behavior. Furthermore, Internet samples tend to be more diverse with respect to gender, age, socioeconomic status, and geographic region than nonprobability samples generated by many traditional data-gathering methods ( Gosling, Vazire, Srivastava, & John, 2004 ). The unusually large size of our sample allowed us the statistical power to explore many variables of interest. For a detailed discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of Internet research, see Fraley (2007) .

This survey provides a unique look at how men and women navigate the business of who pays for dates. The study, however, is not without limitations. Self-selection into surveys is a typical problem in studies conducted with college and community samples. The generalizability of the current findings is limited by the fact that participants were visitors to a news website who self-selected into this sample. People who elected to take the survey may differ from other people in the U.S. population (e.g., they may be more frequent Internet users). Although our sample was unusually large and geographically diverse, it was not nationally representative.

Concluding Comments: “Undoing Gender” or Token Gestures?

The more women contribute and the more men ask or expect them to help pay, the greater the breakdown of old assumptions. It is clearly no longer men’s exclusive responsibility to pay for dates. A solid majority of men (64%) said they expect some degree of financial contribution from women. Albeit fewer, but still a majority of women (56%) said they are not bothered by men’s expectations to share expenses.

The flipside of that statistic—the 44% of women who admitted they are bothered when men expect them to pay—reveals resistance to social change. Even among women who are willing to contribute, a substantial proportion of women indicated that they preferred to choose whether or not to help pay. Choice, although generally desirable, is only consistent with egalitarian ideology in this circumstance if both men and women get to choose whether or not to pay dating expenses, and that is obviously not the case.

Consistent with Goode’s (1980) point, our findings indicated that many women are resisting a change that is associated with loss of a female privilege: six in 10 women said men pay more (and eight in 10 men agree), even after dating a while, and one third of the women in relationships admitted waiting 4 to 6 months or longer before sharing expenses. More research is needed to explore the paradox of many women’s support of ideals of equality while expecting men to pay more on dates.

Our narratives suggest some women are looking for cues of a man’s interest in a relationship while others are testing a man’s prowess as future providers (perhaps especially those women who plan to take time out of the work force in their childbearing years). Many women just declare they enjoy the spoils of chivalry.

Many men seem to enjoy their part in chivalrous scripts, too. Chivalry benefits men because the early stages of dating are fraught with uncertainties and ambiguities, and the men seem more “at risk” of being ill judged than the women when it comes to the decision to pay or not pay. When he doesn’t know a woman well, a man cannot distinguish between the woman who would be offended if he takes the money she offers and the woman who would be offended if he refuses it. When there is no clear path to follow, the safest strategy is to follow traditional gender rules, regardless of whether he actually endorses the underlying norms.

Many men’s willingness to continue to pay a larger share of a couple’s dating expenses, even after a relationship has progressed, may be seen as a display of masculinity that is expected and underscores gender difference that both parties are likely to appreciate, as Ridgeway (2011) asserted. As one narrative vividly showed, gender can even trump relative economic means as a predictor of who pays: Some men may want to pay more even when she earns more (although a third of men thought that women should contribute more if she earns more). While many men want to demonstrate their romantic interest or commitment and/or their financial ability to pay, the narratives also made clear that “who pays” is a sensitive issue for men, too. They do not want to feel “used” by women, and they do not want to think they are dating a hypocrite who espouses one set of values while displaying another. Most important, in an era when men and women share breadwinning responsibilities in the home, men can use this aspect of dating interactions to screen out women whose behavior suggests they will not hold up their end of the bargain if the relationship progresses. Some men use this aspect of dating as a litmus test: If she has not offered to pay in over a month of incurring shared dating expenses, it is not a good sign for the future.

For nearly half the men in this sample, a woman’s failure to ever offer to pay was a deal breaker for these modern men. That, to us, is one of the most interesting statistics to emerge from our study. Imagine the scenario: If a man wants to break off a relationship for this reason, he is unlikely to announce why he has stopped calling. That leaves the abandoned woman left to ponder if he met someone new or if it was something personal about her that he did not like. It is highly unlikely that she would ever guess it related to her failure to pay up. Couples who might be good for each other may be losing relationship opportunities if the woman follows the traditional script with little thought about the consequences.

Bigger sea changes in the expected behaviors of men and women in relationships would have to be linked to a deeper breakdown of gender as the primary cultural frame that coordinates our social relationships. For example, we have seen no data that parallel ours that suggest that now the risk inherent in “asking for a date” is also a shared responsibility. As long as these two chivalrous behaviors, asking and paying, are linked, and as long as men are expected to perform the asking, there will be social and internal pressures on men to pay more. On a broader scale yet, gender disparities in pay and domestic responsibilities are slow to change, and are consistent with the current pattern of men’s paying more on dates. Why should women pay half if they don’t earn the same or if they won’t reap the benefits of a partner who does half of the housework?

So we are far from a conclusion that gender is irrelevant in determining who pays, but Risman (2009) is willing to consider gender is to some extent being undone where it is becoming less relevant. With this lesser standard in mind, we believe that our data clearly show that this part of gender standards is being “undone” by a substantial number of men and women.

The answers to one of our research questions are clear, and extend Ridgeway’s thesis: The social and economic changes in the domestic sphere do now start before a couple moves in together; in addition to shifting families to see “breadwinner” as a shared role, expectations have also shifted regarding women’s contribution to dating expenses. Although we don’t have the ability to test for changes across time, it is notable that fully a quarter of daters in relationships reported that they started sharing expenses “right from the start” and four in 10 were doing so after the first few dates, during which insecurities may have led to reliance on tradition.

Which people are “undoing” gender in this way? Across age groups, there were few differences, but some of the items suggested possible cohort differences. Younger men were more likely to state that they would stop dating a woman who never offered to pay for expenses, and younger women were more likely to offer to help pay. Overall, men ages 26 to 35 were most likely to endorse egalitarian ideals, as were men with a college degree or higher. Similarly, women ages 18 to 35 and women with college degrees or higher were most likely to endorse these ideals.

The weak association between education and income and paying behaviors is not that surprising. Women of all ages and across social strata are entrenched in the labor force, underlying the impetus for this change, while the deeply embedded ideals about gender are a resilient mass cultural framework that slows it down (Ridgeway, 2011). In the context of these competing forces, where impetus for change seems to be winning, an interesting solution emerged wherein many men’s willingness to absorb the price of early dates and more than half the costs later on keeps chivalry alive, gender roles distinct, and some privileges for both sexes intact.

Consistent with Zelizer’s (2005) general premise that a new combination of intimacy and economic activity is evolving, the data we have presented here suggest that the deep-rooted courtship ritual around who pays does not adhere rigidly to traditional gendered social norms. The transformation of the relative material and social power of women and men may be leading to a new age, even in the delicate financial interactions within the realm of early dating.