this post was submitted on 13 May 2026
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A Boring Dystopia
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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.