Just Pay Already

MY THERAPIST approaches my tales of dating apps and booty calls and ghostings with an adorable anthropological fascination. Recently he asked me whether a man I was dating paid for my meals and drinks. “Of course,” I replied. “Hmm,” my therapist said. His “hmm” is the verbal equivalent of looking skeptically at someone over your spectacles, and I knew where he was going: doesn’t a man paying for a date add a transactional tension to what follows the date? And if gender equality is the goal – isn’t that always the goal now? – shouldn’t men and women split the bill evenly?

Well, no. For most of my dating career, I’d