Study: Most Men Want to Go Dutch

If chivalry means footing the bill, a new study suggests it just may be dead.

A team of researchers set out recently to investigate gender norms and how they’ve changed over the years, specifically when it comes to the question of who pays for dates. California State University’s Janet Lever and colleagues from Wellesley College and Chapman University surveyed more than 17,000 participants and found that two thirds men (64%) said they’d like to share dating expenses, or go dutch.

Other important findings of the study: 44% of men said they would stop dating a woman who never pays for dates, but 76% reported feeling guilty accepting a woman’s money. Women aren’t any less conflicted. More than half (57%) reported offering to help pay for dates but 39% confessed to secretly hoping their date would reject the offer. Forty-four percent of women were bothered when men expected them to help pay. Coincidentally, that’s the same share of men that would stop dating a woman who never paid.

In all, researchers found that men still pay for most expenses on the date. That’s according to most men (84%) and most women (58%.)

“Our data suggest there has been significant movement away from a monolithic cultural norm for dating and towards a more variable set of strategies and interactions,” the report reads. “The data presented here support the notion that many people‘s behaviors – across age, income, and educational variations – are disrupting old gendered assumptions about “who pays” and in that respect those people seem to be attempting to undo gender.”

And, ultimately, it seems as though couples may move more toward sharing expenses as time goes on. Nearly 40 of all participants agreed that dating expenses were shared in the first month of dating, even if men are payed a larger portion. By the six-month mark, 74% of men and 83%of women reported sharing expenses.