What Do I Owe You If You Buy Me Dinner?

When my girlfriend worriedly asked me about who would cover the cost of an expensive hotel, I noticed a fear that had plagued me all my life in a world where money, power, privilege and love are so closely connected. This long-form feature essay goes over the complicated and nuanced influence of money on love, gender, relationships and sex.

“See, you make more money than I do, which doesn’t mean you have to pay for everything, but if we are going to split payments equally then we have to choose places to eat or stay that I can afford,” she said to me, very clearly, “If you want to go to fancier places that I cannot afford, then I won’t be able to pay for that and if you want to take me, you must pay.”

“I am really glad you’ve laid that out so clearly,” I told her, delighted to be with someone who could communicate with ease about the subject.

We had only been dating a month, the relationship was long-distance and we were in the process of planning a trip to see each other. Most of the time, when we talk about relationships, we talk about the excitement and the emotions, maybe the sex, but there are a few moments when it becomes very clear that money is as important in a relationship (and the only people who say money doesn’t matter to me are the people who have it in abundance), and planning trips is one of those moments. Someone has to fly/commute to get there, in our case it was both of us meeting in a neutral city, there are hotels and restaurants and the thousands of daily little expenses that go along with leaving your home and being elsewhere. Through the years, as a society, we have gained a little more comfort with talking about class and its implications in relationships, but I am not certain we have gotten much better at the brass tacks of directly discussing money, but she was more comfortable with the subject than most people I had dated.

“And also, I know you like a little space, so while I would prefer to have you in the room with me, if you want you can get two rooms, but if it’s at a fancy place, that will cost more and I cannot help with that either,” she said, clarifying that my special needs would be on me.

“I’ll get us a suite that way there will be a little adjoining space and I can take my private time over there,” I reassured her, “Don’t worry, I will pay for that and I know you are already paying for your flights and I am driving down so you don’t have to do more than that.”

“You’re sure, right?” she asked, as I swirled my wine around in the glass and watched her on my screen, “I don’t want to like…feel guilty? I don’t want this to be an issue later, so you don’t have to do anything you feel will be difficult for you later and I really don’t want to feel like I owe you for it so please make the choice freely.”

I knew what she meant. It’s what we all mean when we worry about money. Well, I guess the primary way we worry about it is affordability, and that is also the most common way in which we discuss money. Whether it is budgets, investments, salaries/wages, savings, dreams or loans, the numbers relate to the math of what we can and cannot afford and while that is by no means easy as a subject (or apolitical), it is straightforward. In relationships, affordability is a vital baseline for the conversation, but the (non-budgetary) issues aren’t about the numbers. It’s less about that and more about the significance of the money—what does it mean, where does its power truly reside, what does having/not having more/less than your partner actually signal to them and when does your/my money become our money if it ever happens—all which are questions that are a lot harder to answer than how do we split a bill but it starts there. It started with my girlfriend wondering, out loud, if I would feel like I was owed anything for the money I spent on her (or us) and even if I didn’t feel it directly, would I be resentful once if I decided I hadn’t gotten what I wanted from the trip.

I didn’t take that personally in the form of value judgement, as the person with more financial privilege in that situation it felt like my responsibility to reassure her, nor do I think it’s wrong to want to ascertain these things, and even though one might believe this kind of thing would not be an issue between two women in a relationship, the collective hangover of the heteropatriarchal definitions of everything permeates all our lives. The queer world is (unfortunately) not extricated from the non-queer world. It doesn’t matter that there were four-boobs in that relationship, the idea that the privilege of more money buys you the compliance of people who have less than you has broken the species barrier long ago. The idea that generosity is power is extremely well-understood by us as people. Generosity may be dressed up in the cloak of niceness but it is extremely easy to remove that cloak and start doing the math the second the person you have been generous towards stops understanding the implicit messaging of that generosity and how you are supposed to behave as a result of it. Sadly, I learnt this from my parents.

Affording my (school) education was nothing for my parents (and I am not saying they didn’t work hard but the compensation mechanisms made it so it was a very small segment of their income and wealth). If they actually had to pay, right now, in one lump, the entire sum they put towards my schooling, they could do it without any impact on their lives. There were also other narratives surrounding this with regard to parental responsibility when it comes to educating your children. It didn’t matter, though, the second I suggested I didn’t want my life to take the direction they have envisioned for it, the guilting that descended upon me was unrelenting and it had a singular theme. We have spent all this money educating you, you are wasting that by doing something other than what we had planned for you. What was so easily couched as generosity and responsibility can be turned into expectation and bargaining at the drop of a hat. It happens all the time with patrons of art and culture, they generously give you money to fund research or art but the second it goes against that interest, you realise the money was never free-and-clear. It’s more like a payment that precedes the knowability of the product. I will give you the money and then tomorrow, a week from now or maybe a year from now, I will decide what you owe me for it.

It’s presented as gratitude. That’s the powerless counterpart of the privilege of generosity. Instead of being honest about the fact that my parents expected conformity, investment banking as a career and the guarantee that I will stop being gay as return for their payments on my education, we pretend that by doing whatever I want to do with my life, I am being ungrateful. If I just agreed to get an MBA, I would be classified as grateful. This is a very large example of the phenomenon but it plays out around us (influenced by many different social factors) in many smaller ways. Recently, in India, there was large-scale outrage when a comedian made a joke about spending a paltry amount of money on buying biryani for his date and how that money meant he was owed something for it—completely tired, sexist bullshit that is sadly too commonplace to be as shocking as it should be—and while we were all righteously outraged at the audacity (as we should be), we don’t seem to collectively wonder where these lessons are taught (and I know the easy answer is patriarchy, and it’s true, but the men who behave this way were once boys who were raised in families similar to our and it warrants taking a closer look at how families teach the meaning of money).

My mother used to tell me she would buy me dresses if I lost five kilograms when I was ten and then very quickly, realizing I had no interest in dresses, she offered books. I am certain almost every Indian kid had been told they will get something (a bat, shoes, a trip or an ipad) if they got a perfect score in their next exam. Little things. I am not saying there is no innocuous way to celebrate an accomplishment or person with a gift, that there is no way to show love via objects or things that cost monet, I am saying there is a difference between a reward, a bribe and a gift, and this relationship with money we are learning isn’t exactly the love-language of gifts. The little things turn into expected behaviours very quickly. I bought you a nice dress, why are you still fat in it? I spent money on your diet, be the kind of pretty you are supposed to be! I bought you that guitar, be a good daughter now. That’s when it really starts to get dangerous, when specific expectations turn into general codes of behvaiour. When it goes from greeting aunty with a smile to being good because I take care of you.

That is also how we present money, no? Money is how they take care of you. Money is love, even. For many, it may not be how big the diamond, but the fact that there is a diamond is enough to demonstrate how ubiquitous it is to love. Again, I am not saying that money cannot be used to express love. In many ways it is the most directly and quantifiable way we have to demonstrate anything, right? Though, I think we are universally bad at math because it’s so obvious that the value of a gesture, if measured in terms of money, shouldn’t be based on how much something costs, but what proportion of your wealth/income it costs you to make that gesture but I digress. Gestures aside, money is often proof of care and even worth. My father, for instance, measures his contribution to his family in terms of what he provides for it and actionably, that is money. Again, it’s more complicated that absent fathers and sexism (even though that is genuinely a part of it), my father didn’t come from wealth and getting to wealth meant having a job that had him away from home the majority of the time. I barely saw him growing up and he barely saw me, but now that he is older, I can see that he wanted to see me, and because he had to console himself about not being able to, he did so believing very hard in the fact that he did all he did for his family and because he cared about us.

It’s not entirely true. Success is its own ego-massage and we all do things for it, his wealth didn’t just benefit his family and he enjoys it too, we all do things for our own benefit, and so did my father, but it’s not entirely untrue either. After a lifetime of measuring his worth as a human-being—a father, a partner, a citizen—in terms of how much money generates, the prospect of retiring is daunting to him because when he brings in zero bucks every month, he is worried that he will see himself as worth as much to his family. That’s a generous (but accurate) interpretation of the situation. The less-generous version (but accurate) is that when you view yourself as having no monetary worth in a world that measures power by it, you worry about losing your bargaining chip and your ability to exert control. All of these systems related to money—love, control, family, affordability, worth and value—defined my relationship with it very early and the first big decision I ever made about it was that I had to strip myself of the money of my family if I wanted any agency or real relationships. I had to have my own money to live my life the way I wanted because financial and familial emancipation, I realised, was the price of freedom, especially for a woman.

That’s the big, pink elephant in the room. The fact that I have made it this far without discussing gender is astounding. I fully realized how big this elephant was once I turned eighteen, left home and more importantly, stopped taking the money of my parents in any form. My mother had taught me only one, big lesson about money as a woman, that I had to always ensure I was skilled enough to earn my own money and be self-reliant, but if I earned more of it than my eventual partner(s), I had to keep that hidden from them because it would make them feel emasculated. She also told me I had to earn my right to work by also doing everything else a woman is supposed to do (as free labour): domestic labour, cleaning, cooking, raising children. The implications of this lesson coupled with the control my parents (and their world) applied to their families using money thrust me into financial hyper-independence. It felt like the safest choice and, for many years, that is how I existed, especially when it came to dating and relationships.

I didn’t take money from anyone for anything. If we went to dinner, I paid or we split the bill, because I heard enough about the expectations of (cis) men in exchange for their generosity. After leaving my affluent cocoon, I moved to a big city where dating was open and all around me (and I also stopped sleeping with creepy married men three times my age), as were the contradictions of existing within it as a queer, poly feminist. The debates raged around me—who should pay for dinner, should you offer to pay as a woman, what do you really owe if someone spent money on you—and I understood the talking points, alongside the loud absence of anyone not cis-het, from the conversation but I didn’t really know how to navigate any of it. I didn’t even know where I stood on who should pay at dinner, you know? On the one hand, makes sense to split it, on the other hand, women are paid less than men for the same job so, fuck you, pay for dinner. Sense dictates that whoever chooses the restaurant and invites the other should pay or we could pro-rate dinner based on what we make, but that often also excludes social context, and then of course, there is the implication of what it means to pay for dinner and all of it was enough to be so muddling, I took the hardline stance. No one pays for anything for me, ever. Was that feminism? I don’t know but it was the safest choice.

During this period, I also worked as (what we called) an escort (while I attended college) for one of those “I show up at this hour and we do the thing in under an hour” services and I loved the direct nature of that transaction of inter-personal business. You give me exactly this much money and for that I give you exactly this service, it was very different from the nondescript expectations attached to money that I had come to loathe. In this period, I also had a very close friend, let’s call her Freida, who was, for all intents and purposes, a sugar-baby (by today’s most identifiable language). She had like forty men in her life who all gave her money but unlike the directness of my transactional sex-work, Frieda’s transaction was very ambiguous. The men didn’t want to feel like clients (which I get, I think) but they also wanted to dictate what kind of girl Freida should be. The fun girl-next-door who is secretly conservative but will take off her clothes for you. She had to dress a certain way, look a certain way, talk to them a certain way, cook for them, be their emotional baby-sitter and deduce all kinds of other expectations they had which weren’t outrightly stated. To me, my mother’s marriage and Freida’s sex-work seemed extremely similar. I thought of my sex-work as an empowering escape from the unspoken transactions of gender-relations (and I did what I did because I wanted to and I wasn’t being exploited in the process due to privilege), it would have been easy to conclude that sex-work is fundamentally empowering if you give it its due as labour (and it is labour) and choose it, but I could not see what Freida did as the same as what I did. To be fair, she felt the same way about what I did.

At least in one way, we were both similar, we were being chosen by men in order to make money. That’s a larger problem that afflicts a lot more than just sex-work. I take little issue with the concept of needing to be chosen but it’s too gendered to be fair, you know? In so many situations, even when it’s not directly men making the decision on who is a good hire, the systems have a distinct patriarchal flavour. Smile at interviews, you get hired more frequently as a woman. Hell, if you are too smart as a woman, you’re less likely to get hired. It’s no wonder that men feel confident when they stand in judgement of women in terms of who is a catch and who isn’t (and sure, women can be as focused on appearance, but there are lot more hot women on the arms of “ugly” men than vice versa, just saying, and please spare me the men are visual essentialism). Even how a woman makes money is not free from scrutiny. A man who is a pimp is more likely to get grace than a sex-worker. A man who works a “menial” job is lauded for doing what he needs to do to support his family but entire professions that have been largely occupied by women for a while (teaching, nursing) are underpaid as a whole, and some of them (like teaching), aren’t even viewed as real jobs. This permeates into dating and relationships too, because whether they will date you often depends on how you make money.

I heard unending discourse on whether men (as if that is all we could envision dating) would be with a sex-worker, never a single question about whether women would date a pimp, but I got a more realistic experience of this from a former parter after I finished college, started graduate school and became a journalist. We had been together for a really long time but once I started working in the organised sector, within my chosen profession, I moved to his city and he largely started to live both with and off me. He was a bum. He was older than I was, abusive (in many different ways) and eventually, almost completely financially dependent on me. I was the 21-year-old provider in that relationship. I didn’t quite know this until it began but that’s not the same as being my father. In my mother’s circle of friends, they excuse a lot of the behaviour of their husbands because they provide for them, but when I became the provider for my partner, so much of me came under scrutiny. He needed my money but first-and-foremost, he hated how I earned it because this profession was not for women. He saw it as the primary impediment to civilizing me into eventually becoming a suitable wife.

We think of financial independence as the best method to ensuring a woman can leave a relationship that is unsafe, and it is tremendously important, but it is only a part of how a culture enslaves women to marriage. My ex used my grandmother as the ideal example of feminism and whom I should have aspired to be. My grandmother came from a very progressive family for her time. She started working when she was 21, she had three masters’ degrees and worked through three children and 45-years of her life in both pre-and-post partition India but she was a teacher. A suitable profession according to my partner and more importantly, unlike me, she wasn’t arrogant or egoistic about her abilities. She suitably deferred household and social power to my grandfather and never shirked her true duties (ie: housework, child-rearing and spiritual responsibility). She enduring the abuse of my grandfather and stuck by him through many affairs (some of which were molestations). What was she going to do? She couldn’t leave, she would be shunned by family and society, and viewed as damaged goods, besides, no one was going to come date/marry a single-mom (and that has not changed as much as we want to believe it has). My grandmother had her own money but that did not enable her to leave a bad relationship because she was culturally and socially enslaved. My partner saw the nature of my career as a threat to potential cultural enslavement.

He was right. Once I was wise enough to kick the habit of his abuse, the only thing that made me worry about leaving him (aside form my safety) was the fact that he was financially dependent on me. As the provider, I worried about what he would do, something that men don’t quite experience the same way. Recently, in India (and consistently in India), a woman died by suicide after being harassed by her husband and in-laws, allied to this a narrative sprang up, women in India make these threats/allegations to build cases to get more alimony. A shocking number of men believe the primary way in which men are abused by women in through alimony and it is way worse than what they do to women. A friend of mine married a man when they were both in their thirties, she left a thriving career to move to his city as he promised to support her, he encouraged her to take a few years to not work and a few years later, when the marriage soured and they decided to end it, he began hiding all assets to try to demonstrate that her zero-rupees in income was actually more than his. It’s not as if there isn’t actual misuse of laws meant to protect women by other (usually privileged, educated, savarana feminists) but compared to the financial exploitation of women, they are a drop in the bucket.

When I left my abusive, financially exploitative partner, I left him money (even though we were not married) and I left him almost all of my belongings because I thought he probably needed them (and the ones I wanted back, he wouldn’t give me). That experience, for a very brief period, led to a small addition to my primary rule about money – Don’t take money from any potential partners for anything and don’t spend any money on anyone either, be an isolated financial island. Money and trauma are so closely linked for so many of us that it was hard to see how this safety behaviour was a trauma response for me. It felt like choice but in practise, as it defined my relationship with money, it also became the lack of choice. It became rigidity and the absence of nuance. It became unanswered questions. If money is freedom, then does lack of money mean you cannot access it? Is everything you do in a relationship with money always gendered? Can you ever provide for someone in a way that doesn’t define you? Can a relationship actually transcend money in some ways?

I was destined to be a financial recluse but my relationship with money in relationships changed when, shortly after leaving my former partner, I met my current-spouse. I had a financial experience that was very different from everything I had experienced before because we were poor together. When we met, everything happened so quickly and wildly, that six-months into dating we were living together and had adopted a cat. I had been in love so many times but I had never co-habitated with a partner. My ex stayed at my place most of the time, but he had his own place too, and even though I paid the rent for both places, it made me feel safe enough to not think of us as sharing a household. When I moved in with my now-spouse, that was the first time I lived with a partner and that changes something about money and how it works. Cohabitation changes how you approach money in a relationship. First of all, you have to talk about it. There’s just no way around that. We had to discuss expenses and who would pay what and what percentage of it. You have to discuss income-levels and affordability. You have to set up systems of payment. You have to talk long enough to have a real plan. The second thing that happens is the grey area of money that you develop. I understand that some people can or have to keep track of everything but there are little things you just, cannot track. A guy comes home to collect the newspaper bill while the responsible party is out, someone buys a muffin for the other when out, someone runs short one evening on cash, I order dinner from my phone instead of yours. The lines blur if you are able to let them.

Though, it is hard to let them. The reason, I think, I was able to let them blur in this relationship was because, for the first time in my life, I was dating a man who truly respected me. He was a decade older than I was but when we met, I was a 23-year-old making more money than he was. He was the first person in my life, ever, to treat that information like something to be proud of and not something to hide. He didn’t want my money, he didn’t want me to take his money and he wasn’t weighing my money for value. He made me actually want a state of being where we could make money not matter. It’s all well and good to say that but it takes a tremendous amount of work and trust to actually be in a relationship where, functionally, it could not matter. Additionally, he was getting divorced and he was actually willing to pay his wife alimony, and openly discussed how her labour in that marriage deserved financial compensation even if he disliked her deeply. I like that kind of nuanced emotional decision-making in a person. It enabled me to do something my life-experiences should have prohibited.

I supported him financially through his divorce in every way I could. Every single person in my life thought I was insane for doing this including his lawyer. They all had different, predictable reasons, but I had just one, I wanted to give the person I loved what they actually needed as support during that period of their life. Divorce, lawyers and child-support are very expensive though, a well-paid 23-year-old has nothing in their coffers that actually enables this experience so through the next few years we were dirt poor together. We worked a lot but we had very little. I will not romanticise the financial aspects of this, it is truly very hard to exist in a state where you have to constantly worry about money and genuinely consider if you might need to go into debt to survive. It’s fucking horrible. However, I will say, surviving poverty together was the kind of experience that I think our relationship genuinely benefitted from. My relationship with money changed again in some ways and it actually stopped being so important in our relationship. I don’t mean that as a general thing, in relationships, it is very important but in a particular relationship, it can lose its power as a symbol and passive meaning.

It doesn’t happen magically. You have to bring everything—privilege, class, history, poverty, disparity, gender, relationships, divorce, society—to the table and work through it, but eventually you can soften its hold. I finally came to see that I couldn’t have a hardline position on the treatment of money in relationship. I will never is as silly as I will always. How you treat money in a relationship has to depend on the relationship and for me, I think, I realise the goal is usually to get to a place where we can collectively soften its hold and make it easier for everyone involved. As I said, that’s not an ideological thing, but a practise. Through the years, my spouse and I have developed a shared economy within a household that also contains a child. You cannot wing it when it comes to that. We have shared money and we have separate money. We have the comfort of including the income of the other in our budgets and the comfort to accept that we need a plan to divide these income/assets should that situation ever come to pass between us. To make money less powerful, you have to truly deal with it. You have to plan with it. You have to show what it means to each other and remove any potential power from it. That is the only rule I have when it comes to money now.

Of course, now is also very different than before. The final change in my relationship with money (up until now) happened when I was 30. Until then, money had been many things for me—power, control, freedom, feminism, equality, emancipation, safety, the lack of safety, provision, partnership, support—but it had never been enjoyable. Until 30, between the debt from divorce, the world, the child and such, we had enough and a little more, but after 30, I started earning more too. Suddenly, I had more disposable income than I ever expected to have, more than I could put into compulsory savings and investments, and then I realised that there is one more thing that happens, perhaps, when you are a woman who earns her own money. The guilt for spending it on yourself. I love being a provider in my household and socially. I love contributing financially to my stepson, my family and my friends. That makes me feel worthwhile (in a vein similar to my father) but any money I spend on myself feels…wasteful and wrong. That’s about trauma, I know, it’s just measured in money.

I think my family and my partner noticed before I did. I had money and I would mend every pair of pants until it was just threads. I would never replace broken things (and that’s partly sentimental, I like broken things), instead I would adapt to using them broken. If I am alone, I won’t even define necessities the same way. I spent a year working on my phone instead of my laptop when it broke. I spent a whole winter bathing with freezing cold water instead of repairing the water heater. It took so long for me to consider myself worth a vacation or ever taking a day off. Honestly, maybe I wouldn’t have ever done it if my spouse hadn’t started buying me nice gifts. Things that I did, and sometimes do, deem unnecessary. I don’t like gifts, or I didn’t, every year since I was nine, my mother buys me a more-expensive version of the same leather ballet-flats that are too narrow for my feet and it just serves to remind me that I am the wrong shape. All the presents Freida’s partners bought her were for them and to control her. I don’t like gifts, or I didn’t, but then my spouse started buying me things. Nice pants, expensive sneakers, an ipad so I could have an extra device. Initially, it felt horrible, like I didn’t deserve these things and it was wasteful to have them. Worrisome because I am terrified of being dependent on luxury (like my parents) and material objects.

Then, four years ago, he suggested we take a real vacation. He told me I could afford to take a fancy one if I wanted and I had three panic-attacks to justify not taking it but ultimately, I did it. I took time off work. I booked a gorgeous villa. I bought my stepson nice beach-toys. I got there. I stared at the sea from my own little pool and prepared to admonish myself for being so wasteful and instead, I realised, I wasn’t worried anymore. I wasn’t worried about how I was paying for this, who was paying for dinner, what it meant and whether I deserved it. I just felt okay. After all those years of rallying against the concept and reality of money, I had finally managed to use it to buy myself freedom from it. I realised that if I could, I would facilitate that for as many people as I loved whenever I could, which is why when my girlfriend asked all those questions about hotels and who was paying, I knew exactly what she wanted. She didn’t want to worry about the money of it long-enough to enjoy being together. That, to me, is the highest purpose of money. I don’t want to earn enough to last three-generations. I want to retire, not wealthmaxxx, and I want any money I do earn to make life less worrisome for me and the people I date and love.

That doesn’t mean it is always easy. I exist in the same world of terrible financial ethics, disparity, sexism, gender and exploitation. I am also the same person who had all of these experiences and even as I buy myself puzzles and beautiful teapots now simply for the sheer joy of it, it is easier to exist under the strain of wanting to send my stepson to college. Even when I am happy to be the person who pays for dinner and ensures that isn’t held over your head in any way, I still retain the pain of a person who failed to deliver the life someone else believed they paid to extract from me. It takes money to be rid of the influence of money. That only makes sense in a certain light. Maybe we are all just trying to live in that light.