“Split or together?”
The waitress hasn’t even come to a full stop to ask the question. She looks at you for your answer over her shoulder. You don’t meet her gaze. Instead, you look across the table into the eyes of your…person. The person who you don’t find repulsive, whose gender matches the one you’re sexually attracted to. The maybe person.
The sounds of people chattering and plates clanking seem to get louder. You’re still looking into each other’s eyes. The waitress has now awkwardly stopped, awaiting your answer. In this half second, you will attempt the most herculean feat of nonverbal communication in human history.
First, you must establish if he thinks this is a date—like the have-her-back-home-by-11, subtly-but-not-at-all-subtly-spend-the-night-trying-to-touch-her, try-to-not-make-it-feel-like-a-job-interview kind of date. (For the next 500 words, I’m making the maybe person a man. For me, he’s a man. And you’re a woman, because, um, I am. Welcome to my head.)
You also must establish if you think this is a date. You’re not sure if you want it to be, but you did spend like 15 minutes trying to curl your hair, and then another 35 fixing the attempt with a straightener. That’s got to mean something, right? And you should listen to your subconscious in these scenarios. It probably knows better than you do.
If he thinks it’s a date, and you think it’s a date, you also would like him to know that finding this out when the check comes is suboptimal. He’s a modern man and these are modern times, so nothing has been explicitly stated—nothing that could make any one experience any kind of rejection. What’s happening is anyone’s guess. He’s asked you to eat a meal off campus (datey) on a weekday (not datey). And now, he’s asking you out for the first time by awkwardly lagging when the waitress asks who’s paying. He’s asking you on a date that already happened. This is not attractive to you.
On the other hand, you don’t think the onus should always be on men to ask women out. That’s so archaic, but the thought of taking steps to reverse it is a miserable prospect. Making the first move with someone is on your to do list, somewhere between taking care of your three weeks of laundry buildup and finding your old collection of state quarters in your home storage so you can reclaim your $12.50.
But even if he does decide to confirm the maybe date by offering to pay, and you decide that you want to allow it to have retroactively been a date, you don’t know if you can accept.
You’ve yelled “f*** the patriarchy” before, but that’s mostly because it’s really fun to say, not because you particularly mean it. You speak out against sexism’s tangible harms, sure, but you’re not insulted by chivalry. You’d rather he didn’t try to open the car door for you because of the miserably awkward wait time, but lending jackets and pulling out chairs and stuff is kind of nice.
You like tradition. You like that your whole family has the same last name, never mind if it came from your dad. In fact, hyphenating children’s last names really bothers you. Does no one notice how unsustainable the practice is? What if two hyphenated babies got married? What would their kids be? Little baby Sherman-Karyotakis-Shenseki-Jackson? Imagine them filling out forms, like for college or voter registration. Oh goodness—they’re already doing everything under the sun to keep liberals from voting. This can’t help. No, hyphenation can only last for a single generation. And you thought liberals were supposed to be obsessed with sustainability!
Dismantling all of these old systems is often kind of pointless and results in chaos, and that’s probably the case here too. Just look at how disastrous dismantling the old system of Boys Asking Girls on Dates has been—it’s led to this moment. If he offers, you need to accept so that you can let him know that you’re consenting to the dinner having been a date.
But then you think about a series of studies you read that highlight just how powerful a motivator reciprocity is. You recall that people were asked to donate money, and in one study, giving participants a conditional gift–telling them that they would receive a gift only if they donated–lessened the average amount they would donate by almost $10. But another study showed that making the gift unconditional had the complete opposite effect. Giving a small unconditional gift increased donation rates by 17 percent. A large unconditional gift? 75 percent. Dinner, you think, is a large unconditional gift, and it makes you feel like you owe him. You know that this tool has been used to manipulate women’s behavior for centuries.
You don’t think that he’s conscious of this or trying to manipulate you at all. But you do think it sets up a pretty toxic dynamic, and you’d really rather not feed into that. Unavoidably, you will feel a debt to him. Whatever intimacy the two of you experience will feel a little transactional. You know that you shouldn’t – you know it so well – but accepting dinner will make it feel like you owe him your affection. You think you want to give it—the hair incident is telling you that you want to. But you want to choose to do so freely, just because you want to.
You can feel the waitress getting agitated. She’s holding heavy plates. You intensify your gaze. Is he following what you’re saying? They say 90 percent of communication happens through body language, so he’s getting 720 words of this, right?
“I have a coupon,” he says. “Free dinner for two.”
Oh. Huh. Well. Bullet dodged.
Maybe you should verbalize some of this nonverbal communication. The thought makes your stomach feel topsy turvy. It’s going on the To-Do list. You put it somewhere after finding those quarters.
Ellie Schaack is a Trinity senior. Her column runs every other Tuesday.
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