I am a big advocate for generosity in men and how attractive that can be, but cheii! My sisters are taking it too far. What exactly is a man paying you for after a date?
My generation has definitely become dinosaurs roaming this earth. To think that when some of us dated, a date amounted to him visiting you at university and then we would take these long, winded walks around the campus, talking and exchanging sweet nothings, until the hall custodian threatened to lock you outside!
I narrated this kind of date to a Gen-Z birdie and she looked at me with utter disgust. She quickly related my ‘naivety’ to her friend who allows an intending suitor to squeeze on a boda boda behind her, mbu to drop her home.
“How is a man going to demonstrate that he can take care of me and a family in the future, if he cannot even pay for an Uber? Couldn’t he take you to a proper restaurant instead of walking you up and down and sideways like a dog?” she tasked me.
Not to be outdone, I told her: “At least we were fit!”
So yes, the era has changed; young women know exactly what they want in a mate, but never did it occur to me that things have changed this much. Financial rewards for taking you on a date? Doesn’t that automatically introduce the pressure to give sex in return?
A date does not have to culminate in sexual encounters, but the way we are going, women are making even well-intentioned men feel like they are paying for something, and heaven help them if they are going to just buy dinner, pay for your company and then simply walk away.
Did prostitution get a new name and format while we all slept? Enlighten me, so when you really, really like the man and he is not that into you, does it mean after the date, you are the one that pays him? How does this even work? Does it also mean that you absolutely never spend any money on men?
When the talk first surfaced, I thought it was just a misguided, unemployed, lone she-wolf. But then, more and more women came out in her support, and I am yet to recover my jaw from the ground.
Did my generation miss a money-minting opportunity by going on so many dates ‘free of charge’?
Sorry, today I have more questions than answers and I would actually appreciate some answers. What I know, if I could do life all over again, I would still go with the stupid, puppy love that made us walk around Makerere’s school of Industrial and Fine Art, unseeingly analysing those sculptures as someone’s son tried to shoot his shot, leaving our broke a**es still broke, but high on oxytocin.
And when we dressed up for an actual date in a nice place, we understood we were there to bond with this person, and not to charge per hour.
I would take that any day, over the business transactions followed by meaningless, entitled sex that the millennials and Gen Zs call dating today. Even the Gen Z men are seeking out sugar mummies that will not ask for a dime, but will instead pay these toy boys. It is a generational epidemic!
Fan your children’s self-esteem. Above all, encourage them to ‘make money’ so that one day they don’t embarrass you with this beggarly spirit.
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