The other day, ZeroHedge had a throwaway article on the cost of a “cheap date”, defined as “cab rides, dinner/lunch for two at a pub or diner, soft drinks, two movie tickets and a couple of beers”. I would agree that this definition of a blue-pilled standard date is reasonably accurate but you should probably value your time as more than 0. Here is the infographic they used:
I am reasonably well-acquainted with the situation in Stockholm, so I will use this city for the following, even though I do not think that the situation is much better in other cities. The biggest issue I see with the figure is that what you get in exchange for your money, ignoring her dangling the possibility of sex in front of you, is really not a lot. The kind of food in those bottom tier establishments is of a really low quality. You will probably regret spending money on it the moment the waiter puts the plate on your table. If you wanted to get a chick by wining and dining, you likely would not impress her much by taking her to some corner pub.
In today’s fiscally hostile and inflationary, a meal for one person at a mid-tier restaurant in Stockholm that serves food at a quality you can not trivially replicate at home will cost you around $40, drinks not included. This is nothing particularly fancy either. With one or two side dishes and beers, you will easily rack up a bill of more than $100. I could now jest that steaks, and sides, and beers is not optimal anyway because a well-fed chick may not feel like putting out. She feels “heavy”, so she is less inclined to get naked with you later. On a somewhat amusing side note, a chick who has set her mind to banging you will probably just nibble on a few leaves of salad in order to avoid feeling heavy and “ugly”.
A really cheap date should cost you somewhere between $0 and $10, i.e. get coffee or tea, go for a walk, and head back to her place. If she wants to bang you, she will be fine with that, and if she does not want to bang you then spending about $250, which is my estimate of the cost of a mid-tier date in Stockholm, is not going to change her mind. Chad gets laid for $0, and blue-pillers easily end up paying $250, without getting laid.
There are a few interesting trends in dating, such as the skyrocketing rate of both men and women who do not have sex, voluntarily or otherwise, or the ever-declining marriage rate. Rents are also ever-increasing. If you are stuck in that kind of hamster wheel, then spending money on dates is just not an attractive choice. In fact, I have a hunch that relationships, and with it, dating are disappearing. The only realistic option for most men and women are random hook-ups. Sure, the women may want more but Chad does not want to get tied down, and the other men she does not find attractive enough, so she will only get a quick pump-and-dump.
I would argue that economic effects will invariably lead to dinner dates disappearing altogether as the cost is no longer justifiable. Granted, in a place like Stockholm, Sweden, where prostitution is partly outlawed, i.e. only the man breaks the law, there is no easy alternative, but Swedish men are leaving this country in large numbers. In other countries, hookers can be had for less than the cost of a cheap date, so why bother anymore? I cannot even imagine that there are guys out there who would spend hundreds or thousands of bucks for nothing in return. At some point, those guys will realize that their dating strategy is not sustainable as they are only ever spending, without getting anything in return.
Back in the days of the forum, I remember I used to keep tabs on how much I spent on a date to get laid with a new girl (I was doing this calculation for first dates only, not recurring ones).
That cost would almost always be in the very cheap range, sometimes as cheap as one beer bottle. Little has changed since, I still get laid pretty cheaply. I almost never buy anyone any dinner, at most I will pay for one or two drinks.
The only time I paid a ridiculous amount of money on a first date was when hooking up with a girl in a socially conservative (muslim) land, where going back to her place or to my hostel was not an option, so I ended up spending over 200usd on a fancy hotel room.
It sort of paid off over the next weeks, after I got myself a much cheaper airbnb, and she became a regular overnight visitor.
Aaron,
“I cannot even imagine that there are guys out there who would spend hundreds or thousands of bucks for nothing in return.”.
A lot of guys don’t understand that having dinner/sharing food with a random stranger is an intimate act. I never liked the idea of having dinner with a woman just to get laid at the end of the night. Heck, I got a lot of shit from women back when I was young cause I always opted to dutch. All these women expected a man to pay because that’s what men did. I believe this idea stemmed from the 50s when guys would take a woman to dinner and try to woo her.
On the other hand, some guy’s resort to alcohol since it lowers a woman’s inhibitions believing that they might get laid at the end of the nigh. Yet, alcohol can be very expensive if you’re out with a club slut. I once met this girl via friends, and little did I know that she was an alcoholic. She drank like a sailor, and was able to outdrink most men. I didn’t get laid until a few days later. At the of the night, a lot of men will still opt for dinner dates or drinks just to get laid.
Evolutionarily speaking, it makes sense to buy her something like dinner because you are signaling to her reproductive psychology that
1) you posess excess resources
2) you are willing to invest them in her
However, these are the markers of a desirable long-term provider, they are by no means irrelevant, but they are secondary to the question of short therm mating. If you are tall and/or attractive enough (signaling good genes) women will not care much about your resources for a hookup.
You can invest money into some other, more persistent, markers to signal material wealth without giving out money over and over again at dates. I am thinking about clothes, shoes, cologne, wristwatch, etc.