No, that is what you’re letting the world become. Don’t passively accept any social conformity - esp. when it demands larger and larger amounts of capital.
You let it get this way when you accept it as such. I’ve never made much money, (nor has the spouse) never saw spending money as an option to coincide with dating, (and no, I was not coming from the obnoxious angle that the man has to pay…) so when I started hanging out with the person I eventually would marry, there was no notion that a date involved anything other than hanging out.
Window shopping, coffee and conversation… hell bring a thermos with your own coffee and pack a meal.
(at this point, neither of us drinks alcohol - I was putting out the recycling back in 2009, and saw the beer bottles and cans and had the epiphany that it was an awful lot of money spent on something that did me no good whatsoever. Naah, fuck that shit. Done. A moment of revelation that my husband latched on to after yet another one of his friends drank themselves to death a handful of years ago… when you hit your 50’s and start to lose friends to booze… it’s an eye opener - red warning flags - for sure…)
I guess what I’m seeing in what you’re saying is that there is some informally formal rules for dating that involve spending ever larger amounts of cash… and that what I have found, in finding that perfect person, was that there are no rules to the dance.
If how everyone “dates” has become a cash grab based on expectations of what you’re “supposed” to like to do… Naah. Push back on that. Honestly you do not have to follow any path laid down before you. It’s up to you to change the dance steps.
Step outside the box. You have way more agency than you realize.
No, that is what you’re letting the world become. Don’t passively accept any social conformity - esp. when it demands larger and larger amounts of capital.
You let it get this way when you accept it as such. I’ve never made much money, (nor has the spouse) never saw spending money as an option to coincide with dating, (and no, I was not coming from the obnoxious angle that the man has to pay…) so when I started hanging out with the person I eventually would marry, there was no notion that a date involved anything other than hanging out.
Window shopping, coffee and conversation… hell bring a thermos with your own coffee and pack a meal.
(at this point, neither of us drinks alcohol - I was putting out the recycling back in 2009, and saw the beer bottles and cans and had the epiphany that it was an awful lot of money spent on something that did me no good whatsoever. Naah, fuck that shit. Done. A moment of revelation that my husband latched on to after yet another one of his friends drank themselves to death a handful of years ago… when you hit your 50’s and start to lose friends to booze… it’s an eye opener - red warning flags - for sure…)
I guess what I’m seeing in what you’re saying is that there is some informally formal rules for dating that involve spending ever larger amounts of cash… and that what I have found, in finding that perfect person, was that there are no rules to the dance.
If how everyone “dates” has become a cash grab based on expectations of what you’re “supposed” to like to do… Naah. Push back on that. Honestly you do not have to follow any path laid down before you. It’s up to you to change the dance steps.
Step outside the box. You have way more agency than you realize.