I Went On 14 First Dates In 2 Months. Here's What It Cost Me.

Welcome back to the Single Tax.

My name is Alexa Claire.

I am TFD's content

and production manager and today we're going to be getting into episode two,

which is all about the financial

and emotional toll that going on 14 first dates in two months had on

me.

Before we get into this episode,

we'd like to take a moment to talk about this series' sponsor, Betterment.

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Chapter one, the dating manager experiment.

Dating is one of the biggest untracked expenses in a single woman's budget

and nobody talks about it

because we've been conditioned to think of it

as just life.

Just going out, just putting yourself out there.

But last summer, I ran a pretty interesting experiment.

I outsourced my love life.

A friend enlisted herself as my dating manager.

So that essentially meant that she'd log into my Hinge, make matches,

handle the early conversation, and drop the date straight into my Google calendar.

So, really all I had to do was show up.

The idea was to get out of my own head because honestly,

I was overthinking every little thing about every single match before we'd even meet.

It was coming from a good place, you know, like self-protection.

I am an older sister,

so I'm definitely the type to cross my t's and dot my i's,

but it stopped serving me.

So, I let her take the wheel.

And in my budgeting app,

I created categories to track every dollar the experiment cost me from beauty, outfits,

transportation to the actual dating apps themselves, all of it.

So, it resulted in 14 first dates in 2 months, five second dates,

zero partners, and nearly $400 spent.

While that felt like a lot of money for me, personally,

that's not even close to what some people are spending to participate in the

dating pool.

According to data from Financial Group, the average American adult 18 and older,

whether currently in a relationship or not, spends $2,279 on dates every year.

An estimate of the all-in price of a date from pre-date grooming to gas

money is nearly $168.

Even though most of my dates insisted on paying for everything,

for which I'm very grateful, the numbers didn't lie.

It wasn't an alarming amount.

I'm thankfully employed, I have savings, I've worked hard,

and had some luck on my side to get to that point,

but it begged the question, if I spent $400 on dating,

what didn't get funded?

Was I not investing?

Was I not giving to my emergency fund

as much as I might have otherwise?

What about travel?

That's the question this episode is about.

We call it putting yourself out there, but the receipts call it something else.

This is the single tax, and dating is one of its biggest invoices.

Chapter two, the direct costs.

So, let's talk about the visible, obvious stuff first, dating apps.

At one point, before my friend and I did our experiment,

I had Hinge Premium, that regular degular dating app designed to be deleted.

Uh I also had Bumble Premium,

the dating app that requires women to make the first move.

I had Raya, wow, I'm really exposing myself here.

Uh I had Raya, which is that exclusive invite-only subscription-based dating app.

And I also had Her, a lesbian dating app.

Now, this might seem like a lot,

and honestly saying it out loud has me like But,

in my head it made sense at the time

because they each reel in different groups of people,

all of whom could feature someone

or a couple of someones I want to get to know a little more.

The thing is, though, once you start paying for one,

it's easy to start wondering, "Why not maximize the experience?"

Time to look into add-ons, like visibility features and boosts.

And that's where things get expensive.

I mean, Hinge Plus is around $30 per month.

Bumble Premium is around $40 per month.

Raya, already costing, but with the premium version is $50 per month.

And Her comes in at $15 per month.

But still, this is a lot.

Dating apps are the masters at monetizing urgency, visibility,

and the fear of being filtered out.

Which is all the more scary

when you learn that the global online dating market size was estimated at $9.65

billion in 2022,

and it's projected to reach $17.28 billion by 2030.

Pair that with the fact

that 35% of dating app users have paid for premium features

or subscriptions,

and you realize that the chokehold the dating app industry has on people looking

for love is actually pretty insidious.

Unlike other businesses that monetize for convenience, speed, or quality of product,

dating apps monetize feelings and anxiety-ridden thoughts like,

"What if they're in my likes?

What if I'm missing out?

What if the algorithm is hiding my person?

Why don't I have any likes?"

Once you literally buy into that headspace,

it's tough to stay casual about any of it.

You're already pretty invested emotionally and financially.

And when you're that invested before the first date even happens,

it changes how you show up.

You're more preoccupied with, "Am I wasting my time?"

than you are with just getting to know someone.

Now we got to talk about the next cost, beauty and presentation.

So, let's be real.

Even if you are deeply self-actualized, body neutral, and financially responsible,

you are not about to show up to a date looking crazy.

Over the course of the summer, I went through concealers, setting spray,

I got braids for ease

so I wouldn't have to do my hair every day,

edge controls, nails, perfume.

Why is perfume so expensive when it doesn't even last?

Oh my god, whatever.

I mean, I think for beauty and all,

I spent around $250 throughout the experience,

and that's not even nearly

as much as some of my friends who spend upwards of 500 a month.

It really just gets out of hand.

And perhaps this is because I'm a black woman,

but these especially don't feel like vanity expenses to me.

So, while they might feel like they're out of hand once you see everything

on paper,

in reality, how I present has a massive impact on the way I'm perceived,

received, and treated.

Who I attract and how they engage with me differs massively depending on

if I have my afro out,

if I'm wearing braids, a silk press, a wig, or protective style.

It's like I'm Mystique, the DC Comics shapeshifter, or something.

So, spending on these things becomes signals,

ways of showing I'm taking this seriously and want to be taken seriously.

But, beyond being a black woman in dating,

there's also the persona of the chill girl to contend with.

I wrote about this in one of our latest newsletters, but essentially,

the chill girl tax is that slow,

creeping penalty you pay for matching someone else's lifestyle,

attempting to align yourself with what you perceive their expectations to be,

so you can be easily, perfectly, chill.

If you're spending money to present a version of yourself

that you believe your dating partner would prefer,

well, that's the chill girl tax at work.

It's not simply spending more money, it's spending more of yourself,

and it's tiresome because performance is expensive.

Another pretty obvious cost, transportation.

Some of my dates ended at 10:30 p.m.,

some ended at 2:00 a.m.,

and while NYC has 24-hour public transit,

I'd still opt for an Uber

because being on a nearly empty train at night

while looking cute is not recommended.

So, if I don't feel safe taking the train home, that's an added cost.

Full stop.

Like, I'm talking upwards of $35,

like between 35 and $50 for an Uber ride in New York,

depending on what part of the city I'm in.

Meanwhile, a train ride would cost me only $3,

but add the tax of feeling unsafe to that,

and the 30 to 50 Uber ride starts looking like my only option.

I do my best to budget for safety by preparing to absorb Lyft

or Uber's late-night surge pricing,

but sometimes things catch you off guard.

A date I thought was going to be mid would turn out to actually

be super fun,

and so I'd stay longer.

And when they didn't offer to pay for my ride home,

or if I wasn't comfortable really sharing my address yet, I'd absorb that cost,

too.

Which brings me to something I want to name explicitly.

When you date men, safety becomes a budget category.

It just does.

And we'll come back to that.

Finally, there's the date itself.

The costs, I'm sure you'd expect.

Even in the cases where my date paid for everything,

my spending still rose

because I'd often arrive first

and instead of sitting there twiddling my thumbs,

I'd order a drink or coffee while I waited.

We're talking just $7, $14,

but still money was leaving my wallet before the date even officially began.

Other times when they didn't pay, I'd cover my share for shared activities,

which is completely fine.

It's fine.

But it adds up in ways I wasn't tracking before I created my budget

categories.

Chapter 3, the hidden costs.

Now, what about the costs that don't show up on a receipt?

There's the obvious stuff, the hour plus spent getting ready, the 30-minute commute,

the Wait, did I see something weird spiral in the shower the next day?

But it's not just those isolated moments.

It's the cumulative cognitive load.

It's rereading the text thread, crafting the "Haha, yeah, that was fun." message,

deciding whether to double text, deciding whether you even want to double text.

The average user spends 90 minutes per day on dating apps.

So just imagine all of that every day.

It's heavy.

It's tiresome.

And you get burnt out after a while.

You are literally scouting, interviewing, performing, evaluating, and being evaluated, following up, and recovering.

And none of that shows up in your budgeting app.

But it does show up in your energy.

And energy affects spending.

Because when you're tired, you Uber.

You order in.

You impulse buy.

You outsource.

Time lost has downstream financial effects.

It's just usually too watered down to clock.

So, I can't talk about dating without talking about ghosting.

And I know everyone has an opinion about ghosting.

Just move on.

It wasn't meant to be.

You barely knew them.

Oh my gosh.

But, here's what they're missing.

Ghosting isn't just an emotional event.

It's a financial one.

Because the moment you got your nails done for that third date,

spent time putting together or even buying pieces for a new outfit,

Uber cross town, and spent 2 weeks emotionally investing in the possibility of this

person being your person,

you've already paid.

And then the bill comes due,

and there's nobody on the other end to split it with.

Hope is an expense, and nobody tells you that when you download the app.

Then, there's the narrative I want to linger on for a second,

because I think it's one of the sneakiest costs in this whole ecosystem,

the whole maybe you're being too picky.

You've heard it, I've heard it.

Whether it's from a family member at a holiday dinner,

from a well-meaning friend,

maybe even your own head at 11:00 p.m.

when the apps feel especially bleak.

And it sounds like advice.

It sounds like care.

But, what it actually does, functionally, financially, is expand the market.

Because if you lower your standards, you go on more dates.

More dates means more prep, more rideshares, more outfits, more apps,

more emotional recovery time.

The machine keeps running.

And it is a machine.

The too-picky narrative isn't just a vibe.

It's a revenue strategy for the money-hungry dating industry.

Every date you went on out of obligation, out of giving them a chance,

out of trying to prove you're not too picky, that cost something.

I would know.

All right.

Now, it's time to talk about safety.

When I date men, safety has to be a budget category.

Like I said earlier,

that looks like taking the late-night ride share instead of the train,

even when I can't really afford the surge.

Choosing a bar with good lighting and visible staff,

not because I love the ambiance,

but because I may need witnesses or want a good eye on the exits.

It also means sharing my location with a friend before I leave the house,

especially for evening dates.

Texting someone their license plate number if they're picking me up in their car.

Not drinking too much, not because I'm watching my calories,

but because staying alert is in my best interest.

Choosing a daytime first date specifically so that the exit is safer.

There's less risk of leaving

so soon because we'd agreed to meet during the day.

And that safety isn't a figment of our imaginations.

From a Wired magazine article, a 2019 survey by ProPublica and Columbia Journalism Investigations,

one of the only articles ever to take this issue seriously,

found that more than a third of women said they were sexually assaulted by

someone they had met through a dating app.

And of these women, more than half said they were raped.

But when women try to report these incidents,

many say the dating apps in question often don't even respond.

Now, here's the part that really gets me.

None of those things show up in a conversation about dating costs.

Nobody's out here going, "Oh yeah, factor in your safety Ubers."

But it's real and they're recurring,

and they are gendered in a way we barely acknowledge.

None of my male friends, as much as I love you guys,

have a safety budget for dating.

That's not a criticism of them, it's just a fact.

That gap is a tax, a quiet, invisible,

every single date tax for risk management

that women who date men have been absorbing for years without anybody naming it

as a financial issue.

Chapter four, the gender difference.

Dating women versus dating men.

This one's personal and I want to be clear that it's observational, not prescriptive.

Everyone's experience is different and as a queer woman,

I could never hop on board the just date women even

if you're straight trend.

It's demeaning and it's hurtful for women that are actually looking for love,

not to be someone's experiment.

But since we're talking about cost,

I'd be leaving something out if I didn't acknowledge it.

The financial and emotional structure of dating shifts depending on who you're dating.

When I've dated men, there's often an unspoken performance undercurrent.

Even when things feel casual,

there's a kind of invisible scoreboard operating in the background of like who initiates,

who pays, who seems more interested, who has options.

That scoreboard is exhausting and it costs something in effort, in presentation,

in safety planning, in emotional regulation after the fact.

When I've dated women, the vibe has felt structurally different.

Splitting was assumed or one of us would feel strongly about treating the other.

There wasn't that same ambient calculus of who owes what

or who has the upper hand.

The safety math was also different.

I wasn't doing the same mental triage of is this person safe?

Which train is safest to take home?

Do I need to stay alert?

The performance energy felt lower.

The trust baseline felt higher.

That doesn't mean dating women is inherently cheaper or safer across the board.

Emotionally, dating anyone carries risk.

But the specific costs I've been talking about, like the safety ride shares,

the chill girl performance, the ambient anxiety,

those were more present when I was dating men.

I think that's worth naming even

if it's uncomfortable because the cost of dating is gendered

and it's not just about who picks up the check.

Chapter five, a lesson learned, the pivot.

After running my little summer experiment, I didn't decide to quit dating.

That's not an actual fix.

Instead, I decided to redesign it because the problem was never dating itself.

It was unstructured dating, dating without a budget, financial, emotional, and otherwise.

Dating with an expectation, dating with a timeline I invented in my head,

and a performance I was putting on for people I didn't even know yet.

So, this time around, I'm using one platform only,

no more paying for a bunch of apps just in case, no imaginary timeline.

You know, I've retired the mental countdown.

I have a dating uniform now.

I have two go-to looks that I feel good and pretty in,

so I'm not buying new outfits every other week.

I go on daytime dates.

Yes, a walk in the park

or a coffee date with some board games is elite in my opinion,

and I will absolutely defend it.

Public transit is my default unless safety requires otherwise.

That is one thing I won't ever budge on.

No premium subscriptions either or add-ons unless I'm being really intentional about it.

So, if I'm going to buy that boost,

it's because I'm really made sure

that it was during a time like a Friday night

or a Saturday night

when there's going to be more people on the apps,

and I'm more likely to be more aware of

that and on top of it rather than just let me get the boost,

forget about it, not even use it, and just waste my money.

To be clear, it's not about spending

as little as possible

and calling that progress.

It's about deciding in advance how much dating is allowed to cost me,

financially and emotionally, and building a structure that actually respects those limits,

or at the very least makes it easy for me to notice

when I'm nearing those limits

so I can do something about it sooner rather than later.

Chapter six, zooming out, the bigger picture.

Dating is market-based, algorithm-driven, emotionally charged, largely unregulated,

and gendered in cost distribution.

We have an entire cultural infrastructure built around naming and managing financial stress.

We talk about rent inflation, student loans, child care costs, wedding seasons.

We have spreadsheets and subreddits and TV series about all of it.

We do not, however, talk about the cost of trying to find someone.

And I think that's intentional because if we did,

we'd have to reckon with the fact that the system isn't broken.

It's working exactly as designed.

Dating apps don't make money when you find your person.

They make money while you're looking.

Every time you're almost there, almost connected, almost hopeful, there's a notification, a boost,

a see who likes you paywall designed to pull you back in.

The business model depends on your loneliness having a long shelf life.

And it's not just me saying that.

Match Group, arguably the biggest name in the dating business,

faced a class-action lawsuit in 2024 with users claiming

that Match intentionally designed its dating platforms with game-like features

that lock users into a perpetual pay-to-play loop,

prioritizing profit over promises to help users find relationships.

And so, maybe you're too picky isn't just something your aunt says at Thanksgiving.

It's the ambient message of an entire industry.

Lower your standards.

Go on more dates.

Stay on the streets longer.

Keep spending.

You are not the customer.

You are the product and the revenue stream.

Millions of women are participating in this invisible market every single week,

every single day, swiping, spending, performing, optimizing without a budget line, without a cap,

without anyone ever telling them this is a financial decision,

not just an emotional one.

And then we wonder why it feels so draining.

Chapter seven, getting what I paid for. 14 first dates, five second dates,

zero partners, all in two months.

That's fine.

I don't want a relationship just to say I'm in one,

but here's the part that surprised me.

The ROI I was hoping for wasn't just partnership.

It was novelty, new stories, new lessons, lore,

more clarity about who I am and what I actually want.

And while I gained some of that,

it wasn't as much as I was expecting,

especially given how much I put in.

Dating can be high input and low conversion, financially, emotionally, energetically.

Sometimes the return isn't a relationship.

Sometimes it's just data.

And data is useful, but it's not free.

If dating feels casual, but your spending says otherwise, you're not being dramatic.

You are participating in a market

that does not advertise its full cost

and has no incentive to.

It's not just dinner.

It's the apps, the beauty, the safety tax, the time, the emotional recovery,

the dates you went on because someone told you you were too picky.

The hope you paid for that didn't convert.

It's the entire ecosystem around the dinner.

And once you actually see it, like name it, track it,

look it in the face,

it stops feeling like a personal failing

and starts feeling like exactly what it is,

a structural issue that's been framed as a personal one.

Finally coming to that realization myself has made dating

so much easier and honestly more enjoyable.

I mean, knock on wood.

Let Let's Let's hope it stays that way.

Um I've become way more focused,

or rather able to focus on how I feel on the date itself,

rather than staying ultra focused on finding people

that tick the requirements on my list.

And honestly, I was doing that because I'm here thinking to myself,

if I'm paying all this money on apps,

then I should get what I'm paying for,

which left me without an embodied experience.

I was so much more in my head.

And for that, that change, I'm really grateful.

And so is my nervous system.

Next episode, we're talking about relationship privilege.

What partnered life actually subsidizes that nobody wants to say aloud.

But for now, what's the most surprising cost of dating you've never thought to

track?

Drop it in the comments.

I want to see it.

I'm Alexa Claire.

See you next time.