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I wonder if what you're observing is the result of stronger commercialization in the US.

In Europe, my impression was that most "dates" are just hiking or bicycling together, or cooking together, or in university you'd study together.

For a cooking date, of course one has to buy slightly more ingredients. But I would have been very upset if you would call that "spending money on a woman [..] in hopes of sex" or "a polite form of prostitution", because I'll usually share my food if I have visitors, no matter which gender or intention.

My opinion is that most of the dating that you see in movies is quite impractical, because all of it prevents an honest and intimate discussion. Plus I don't know any couples who met that way.

Shopping? Noisy, crowded, too many distractions.

Cinema? It's either too noisy, or everyone else will hate you for talking.

Restaurant? Why make things unnecessarily awkward by having a private discussion in front of 20 strangers?

In short, my impression was that the woman sizing up the man if he will be a good provider only happens after the blossoming relationship is already working on a sexual level. And I'd say that is reasonable and not offensive. If you plan to move in together or want to have kids in the future, you'll want to have a teammate that can support you.

My mother's a German immigrant. It's entirely possible that my negative reaction to dating as a teen in the US is because I had European expectations of just spending time together and getting to know each other and that's not how that went.

Is "the guy paying" still a thing?

I mean, I sometimes pay for friends or my partners, but I never spend a dime on a women I was dating/courting and I never had the impression they wanted me to do so.

In my experience, women would evaluate me mostly on my character and looks and not so much on my money.

I'm 55 years old and swore off "dating" of the "man pays for dinner and a movie and feels thus entitled to paw me" variety when I was sixteen. So it's possible my information is out of date.

I gather things are in the process of changing and lots of people will, say, just hook up via an app. But, generally speaking, it is my understanding that it tends to still be the norm that the man typically pays for a date.

We do have the term Dutch Treat to mean each person pays their own way. Someone on HN from the Netherlands once described that as evidence of what cheapskates the Dutch are (or something along those lines). Personally, I am inclined to interpret it as related to the fact that the Netherlands has a reputation as having a better than average track record on women's rights and are moving away from social norms rooted in men paying for sex and implicitly treating women as nothing but sex objects for purchase.

(Edit: I'm American. Sorry for doing that American thing and acting like "everyone I talk to on the internet is also American." I'm really tired today. Oops!)

Yes, it's probably a cultural thing and I couldn't even say it's everywhere in the country I come from like I said or just the women I dated.

I think it's more of a possibility that a date is transactional than it is anything like a tendency.

Like, lots of people have spent lots of words talking about how problematic it is to overtly treat it as transactional.

I don't disagree with you, but I've been attacked for stating too bluntly that "dating is a polite form of prostitution." (You will note I swore off "dating" nearly four decades ago -- as stated in a separate comment by me here.)

I'm not attacking you for it, but I'm disagreeing. My point above is that most dates do not have a transactional pretext and are not similar to prostitution at all.

Some dates probably are like that.

Okay. I misunderstood something. I've reread your comment and I don't know where the disconnect is.

One of the things you commonly see is that men get divorced and don't want to pay alimony or child support on the grounds that she isn't sleeping with him anymore.

So I think for a great many people, there is a strong connection between "he pays the bills and his expectation is sex." And I think this begins with our dating norms where he typically pays for the date.

I think the fact that this is baseline normal for most people is why it is offensive to point it out. People want to think their relationship is a good relationship and not transactional and the evidence seems to be that it's much more often transactional than not.

There's a difference between "commonly" and "majority".

Is there data that shows it's a majority of relationships? I tried researching a couple of statistics that might be illustrative in the other direction and didn't find much (not, "didn't find the answers I wanted" but "didn't find any answer").

I'm comfortable calling it the "majority" because that only means "more than half." It doesn't have to mean anything as high as ninety percent.

I don't think saying "at least 51 percent of the time, it's transactional" is some kind of extremist position.

I did this analysis for my own benefit, not to convince anyone of anything. I chose to swear off "dating" of the "polite exchange of money for sex" variety because I felt it undermined my quality of life, my de facto human rights, etc. I'm satisfied with how that decision has impacted my life.

Given what I have overwhelmingly heard from other women, I have the impression that most women are less satisfied with their relationships to men than I have been.

Thanks for adding some more civil discourse to this discussion :) .

You are correct in your assertion that I am in a relationship (we share the same apt) in regards to "dating" a sex worker. I added this context to indicate that I have more first hand knowledge of what it means to be a sex worker than someone who well... doesn't date an online sex worker.

My girlfriend has mentioned that some women do not handle the money well or make emotional compromises with work hours etc that can at times lead to very sad outcomes. It would be a sad day if it was socially "okay" to ask any random woman if they "have an onlyfans" so you can see them naked for $8. That is a sad state of affairs, granted we're already half way there since asking if a woman has an Instagram in many cases could be perceived as asking "do you have an instagram filled with soft-core pornography of yourself?".

I'm open to objection by any of the members of HN who likely (ironically) identify as male feminists. For the record, my gf finds your cause hilarious and pandering at best ;)

For the record, my gf finds your cause hilarious and pandering at best ;)

My "cause"? I don't know what that is supposed to mean.

Bro...