A friend of mine recently posted something on Facebook, it was a list of suggestions on how to find and improve relationships between Black men and women. Most of the list was standard stuff like “be honest about your intentions and what you’re looking for” blah blah blah, but one thing on the list directed solely at men was: Approach and, if accepted, court (pay for the date) the woman you are interested in. Okay, so far so good. But that was followed by a directive at women: Only accept if you have interest, do not use for a free meal.

????????

Well now this is a race-neutral topic. I’ve noticed this over the past 3 years, since I started participating in some of the dating advice forums of Reddit, that this appears to be a major concern among men, especially the younger men, today. None of them ever want to go out for dinner or even lunch on a first date anymore. It’s always “meeting for coffee”, that’s the standard first date invitation now. I find that odd as that doesn’t even sound like a real “date” to me. But apparently its because of a widespread belief that if you ask a woman out for dinner, there’s a strong chance that she will say yes just to get a free meal. She’ll go out with you, eat, and then never talk to you again. So you gotta weed those women out, to make sure they really want to go out with you first.

I didn’t know what to make of this. At first I was assuming this is part of the unfortunate feelings of entitlement that I have noticed from many young men. Y’know, the ones who whine about being “friendzoned” because they’re “nice guys”, and all that. Do these guys assume that if they take a woman out to dinner she has to put out? I thought that attitude died out decades ago, but maybe not? Or could it be genuine misunderstandings? I have talked to many people, of both genders, who are confused when after what they perceived was a good date, the other person turns down a second date. But I’ve had to point out, look, sometimes dates just don’t work out, for no particular reason. You didn’t necessarily do anything wrong, and even if things like conversation seemed to flow nicely, the other person just didn’t feel that elusive “spark,” which is hard to define and impossible to predict. But some men refuse to accept that explanation, and look for a worse one.

It’s like I’ve talked about about “signs”, how some men will think they’ve been getting signs of interest from a woman, so they ask her out. And if the woman turns them down, instead of accepting that he just misread those “signs,” he accuses the woman of deliberately leading him on, and giving him “mixed signals,” because that’s easier than accepting any blame himself. So I imagine that there are situations where a man takes a woman out to dinner and he thinks everything went well, but when she’s not interested in seeing him again he jumps to assuming the worst, that she was never interested from the beginning and only wanted the dinner. Like the woman was really just that hungry…

I mean, we’re not talking about rich guys here, I know there are certified gold-diggers out there. But for average guys, just asking women out to Olive Garden or something, this doesn’t sound like something they’d have to worry about it. It certainly nothing I or any men I know have experienced. But maybe we’re just lucky? I don’t know. So I’ll put this out there:

If there are any men reading this who genuinely believe that this has happened to them, feel free to say so.

And, more importantly, WOMEN. If you are woman and you have actually done this, tell me. And to be clear, I mean, a man asked you out to dinner, and you knew he did not mean as platonic friends just grabbing a bite together, he was romantically interested in your and was asking you on a DATE, and you had no romantic interest in him at all but agreed to go out with him anyway because you wanted the free dinner. Please confess. You can easily do so anonymously here, so please admit it. Where you just really broke at that time and your fridge was empty, or didn’t have time to grocery shopping that day, so you figured, why not, let me get some food from this guy? What?