I Offered to Pay for My Ex-Boyfriend’s Breakfast. His Reaction Is Indicative of a Larger Attitude Among Men These Days.

Unhinged They can’t meet me where I am. Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Felix Mittermeier/Unsplash, pinglabel/Adobe Stock, Unsplash, Rawpixel/Getty Images Plus, soulgems/Adobe Stock, and Towfiqu barbhuiya/Unsplash. Unhinged is Slate’s advice column on the wild world of modern dating. Have a dating question of your own? Send it to Steffi here. It’s anonymous! Dear Unhinged, I’m a woman in my late 20s and independent where I need to be; I have my own friends, my own hobbies, a loving animal companion, a thriving and growing career, and most notably, a life where I want someone to join but I don’t need someone to be able to survive. As I’ve navigated the dating battlefield, I find myself going on dates with men, from dating app matches and in-person connections, who are not able to meet me where I’m at intellectually as well as emotionally, and the big one, financially. Now I don’t care if my partner makes more or less than I do, but they seem to make a big deal about it. I’ve had a past ex snap at me one morning while getting breakfast: “You know you don’t need to pay for everything,” to which I responded, “It was my idea to eat out, so I planned on paying.” He expressed that for him, he had been in a previous situation where he was always the one paying, so he “knows how it feels,” and this must have been a realization point for him as he took another bite of his sesame bagel sandwich. So what are we financially stable women supposed to do? When a great man is just an average woman, how do we make them connect with us in ways beyond “taking care of us”? The income inequality felt empowering to men in dating when it was on their side, but now that it’s flipping, what should we do? Not pick up the tab? Split evenly? Pretend not to have a job that pays us? What do we do about wanting to go all out in modern dating but being continuously let down? —A Fellow Financially Frustrated Female Dear Fellow Financially Frustrated Female, You are dealing with a bad string of dating luck that you just can’t shake. It is an affliction that takes hold of all of us at some point or another, and it’s really hard to know when the plague will leave you. But it will. Don’t get me wrong: I have no doubt that your ex was and the men you’re seeing are indeed projecting their money anxieties onto you. You’re right that in a handful of cities, young women are at parity with or out-earning young men (though the gender pay gap persists). But you can’t “make” anyone do anything. You can’t make the men you meet appreciate you, connect with you, or see you as a partner. You can’t make them feel less insecure, and you definitely can’t make them less lousy. For instance, this sesame bagel man could’ve just told you, “Hey, I really appreciate you getting breakfast, but I want to make sure you’re OK with picking up the bill. Would you want to talk about our financial expectations in this relationship?” But that would have required him to recognize (1) how he felt about you buying him a sesame bagel, and (2) why this situation made him so insecure. It would also have necessitated him thinking about your feelings completely outside of his own. Plus, if he were really empathetic and frugal, he could have also had the wherewithal to cobble together a sentence like, “Also, since you grabbed the bagels, I’ll pick up some groceries for dinner, and we can cook something together.” That would require some combination of perspective, rational thinking, altruism, and kindness that are clearly not evident here. Unfortunately, as is often the case when bumping up against people’s insecurities, it is way easier for them to snap at you over a sesame bagel than it is to confront the fact that they can do better and make different choices. So, how can you weed out the men who are going to be put off by your financial stability? I caught up with a friend of mine in her late 30s, an ubersuccessful brand founder who is constantly squeezing dates into her busy schedule, and asked her about your letter. “She sounds just like me in my late 20s,” she laughed. “I feel like I’m at a point where I give zero shits and I don’t have time for insecure men. I’ve used my profile as a filter. I’m really fucking aggressive about my own accolades, my ladyboss vibe—even though I know that’s so millennial cringe now. I overemphasize that, because I’d rather have people meet me in person and be like, You’re so grounded and chill, rather than the inverse.” What we’re really looking at here is an issue of constant disappointment, Fellow Financially Frustrated Female. And given your context, it seems like you are struggling with a disappointment you would not tolerate in any other area of your life. Why, though? If you go into a restaurant and order an entire buttered lobster with a side salad and a glass of red wine, but they bring you water and sliced pickles, are you going to sit there and convince yourself that the pickles are acceptable? Or are you going to get up, leave the restaurant, and find another place to eat? Despite her many faults, I call on the immortalized words of a young Nicki Minaj, as she spoke during a 2011 interview about the double standards she had to face as a female artist in the music industry: “You have to be a beast. That’s the only way they respect you. … Had I accepted the pickle juice, I would be drinking pickle juice right now.” At a Hinge and Dazed magazine event on dating and love, standing next to some low-slung leather couches, writer Hunter Harris, who writes the Substack Hung Up, echoed this sentiment. She told me she’s similarly dated men who have been insecure about her success. One date, when being invited to her apartment for the first time, said that her TV was smaller than he thought it would be. She lived alone, and he lived with roommates. “That’s their problem to overcome, consider, work through. And you can’t internalize any guilt around that,” she said. “You have to think of it like their insecurity, and not your own shortcoming.” On a call, personal finance content creator Vivian Tu, also known as YourRichBFF online, told me a story about a similar relationship she had years before meeting her husband. “My boyfriend in college was one of those guys who wanted you to do well, but not better than him,” she said. “He was a B-average student at best, with little to no extracurriculars on his résumé.” While recruiting for summer internships, he prepped hard for interviews and frequently talked to her about how difficult it was to land the elusive, decorated internship he was applying for. He didn’t get the job. “The following year I ended up getting that internship,” she said. “I think that’s just a microcosm of how, generally, women are feeling right now.” Tu thinks part of this insecurity certainly stems from the fact that men’s predominant responsibility in a romantic relationship in the past was financial. As long as they bought the white-picket-fence house with a tire swing out front, “you basically got to check out from the relationship,” she said. And certainly this dynamic is far from having been eradicated. Now, however, life and relationships for a lot of people look different. “The economy has gotten harder. Financial circumstances for all young people have gotten harder,” Tu said. “All of a sudden, women are making just as much as men, if not more. But there is still all of this unspoken expectation for women to provide the traditional emotional labor.” The answer to these growing pains for some men is not to shrink yourself, or get caught up in thinking that the way you decide to split a check on a first date is what will make the difference in whether someone can be the equal partner you’re looking for. You cannot make these people meet your expectations—either they want to meet them or they don’t. You just need to be clear about what you are and aren’t willing to accept, and be willing to walk away when it becomes obvious that they cannot give you what you need. I have personally been one to hang on too long because I believed in someone too much. I have since learned that it is never worth it. “The person you choose to be your partner is the most important financial decision you will ever make,” said Tu. “This is the person that will help you navigate the birth of your child, if you choose to have one, or the death of your parents, if they’re still alive—the best and worst days of your life.” These periods of dating duds always come to an end. I know you don’t believe me. I know you think that this will be your purgatory forever. But it’s because you have no evidence to the contrary. So you need to build some evidence. Not by dating more, but by doing things every day that remind you that there are cool opportunities in your life that come to your door every single day, which means that there are sunnier futures ahead, no matter what shape they take. “Most of the people [I meet] are through the lens of my work, which is just a huge aspect of my life, that I just vibe with them so quickly,” said the brand founder. “That’s where I’m most energetically me. Maybe it’s not work for a lot of people, but where are the spaces where you shine the most joyously? Maybe it’s ceramics, chess, or whatever for other people, but for me, it happens to be work. In those spaces, I’ve just met lovely people who aren’t intimidated at all.” Tu also said that if she were single now, she’d probably meet someone “the old-fashioned way,” whether that’s a fellow panelist at an event or a friend of a friend she met through a commercial shoot. “I feel really lucky because I met my husband when I had nothing,” Tu recalled. “I know this man likes me for my personality.” There are people out there who will think of their and your finances as a project you both can work on side by side. Tu reminisced about her first trip to Italy with her husband when they were still dating, when they had less money and ate protein bars for lunch in order to go out for nicer dinners. Now they can afford to stay in nicer hotels, eat three delicious meals, and travel first-class. But the key factor is that they both wanted to build that life together. When it comes to actual dating filters, though, the brand founder also recommends scaring your dating pool a little. Getting really aggressive and upfront on your dating profiles, rather than trying to seem approachable, will automatically weed out people who don’t have the self-confidence to stand next to you. Most of all, do not tolerate disrespect from someone who is perhaps well-intentioned, but definitely not ready for the relationship you want. “There isn’t very much you can do for men who are insecure, and it’s not worth waiting for them,” she said. “They have to prove themselves to themselves. They’re on their own timeline.” Advice Dating and Relationships Personal Finance