The Atlantic

When One Person on a Date Is Just There for the Free Food

“I mean, if it’s dinner, I’m not going to say no, so that I don’t have to go home and cook.”
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Magali Trejo-Martinez, a 22-year-old living in Salem, Oregon, recently went on a date that was rather uninspiring. “I had dinner, had a couple margaritas, and then went home,” is how she recapped the evening. This outcome wasn’t entirely surprising—she says she wasn’t very interested in the guy when she agreed to go out with him—but it wasn’t a letdown either, because he paid the bill. While her heart wasn’t in it, her stomach was: “I mean, if it’s dinner, I’m not going to say no, so that I don’t have to go home and cook,” she told me.

Trejo says that when she goes on a date where food, not romance, is her priority, she doesn’t feel bad, noting that she

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