this post was submitted on 13 May 2026
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A Boring Dystopia
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I can't imagine how this is true. Must be no drink, no apps, no dessert, and mindful choices on entrees. Because just an entree at a regular ( not fancy) place in my town is 24-32 bucks and that's not for the nicest dish. A drink is 8 to 25 bucks depending on whether it's a cocktail. Yeah, your spouse is fine with a quick meal with no add ons, but for a date, where the point is to kill time together, relax and get to know each other, lingering over a dessert and having a drink or two to loosen up is kind of the point.
Obviously you can agree that your first date should be going out to get coffee to see if you click, but that's still going to be 50 bucks after two to four drinks and a couple of scones.
Yes... and no.
I'm going on my 41st year with the husband, and thinking back to when we first met, and started hanging out together and dating.. It was never about the money. We packed lunches and went on picnics, took road trips and went hiking and only occasionally went out to eat. The first time we met, we were in a bar, and struck up a conversation. We'd hang out with mutual friends and chill playing frisbee or catch at the local park. (We both still have the gloves we got as kids in high school!)
In the long run, it's not about how much money you can spend trying to impress each other, or having a good time be defind by an experience created by or bought from other people.. It's about how much time you want to spend together, it's about having conversations, and when those moments you have suddenly not go the way you planned, you roll with it and find a way together, to make it work and have fun regardless.
Best time we had was on a trip into Boston to go to the museum.. Got stuck in traffic behind a road accident and sat for an hour, joking with each other and laughing at everyone else also stuck in traffic having freakouts over it. Him mangling the lyrics to songs on the radio and throwing out terrible bad dad jokes and puns. That was the moment I realized this guy sitting next to me was a keeper.
If you like each other and are easy in that company, it's not going to matter if you're in a fancy restaurant or not.. and at that point why waste the money?
What I've found that makes a relationship into a lifelong adventure aren't the things that can be bought, they're the moments that are unexpected and personally yours.
You're looking at this through the wrong lens. People aren't spending money trying to impress someone, they're spending money because that's what the world has become. Every single one of those that you mentioned still costs money and everything has gotten more expensive.
Edit: Plus, I believe when articles and stuff talk about this, they're specifically talking about going out to a restaurant or something similar like the movies, etc.
Third spaces have been increasingly monetized and monopolized in the past 2 or 3 decades, and CoL has added pressure on top of that. Boston is lucky because it's an old city with some great parks and avoids some of the issues that modern cities have (and that's not to mention the problems outside of cities). If you want to see what a modern US city is like, go down to the seaport - you know, the part of Boston that everybody hates that basically has nothing going on unless you're spending money. According to this article, 100 million people in the US - including 28 million children - do not have access to close-to-home parks. That's almost a third of the US who have to spend money just to touch some grass. And gas is closing in on $5 a gallon, so forget those road trips. Even the MFA is $60 for tickets for two. Burgers are about $20 each now, and drinks are even more. Just a cheap meal can run you up to $100 very quickly.
Regardless of what you're doing, if you're meeting somebody in a third space it's getting hard not to spend a fair chunk of change, and even "cheaper" options are still just that - cheaper by comparison. For every date night someone is having at home, someone else is buying $300 concert tickets.
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.