‘Am I wrong splitting the bill at dinner and not letting my boyfriend pretend he paid?’

Anna Martin

Do you mind splitting the bill?

If you don’t mind, would care if your other half decided they wanted to take credit for paying your part?

Well, one woman wouldn’t let her boyfriend pretend he did and it seems to be a source of conflict for the pair of them.

Explaining the situation, the mystery woman wrote, “I have been dating ‘Ben’ for eight months. For context, Ben and I are from different income brackets, and Ben has expressed that he sometimes feels a little bit weird about this because he is a gentleman at heart but he says it’s hard to treat me since I’m not really impressed by his gestures.

“I’ve said many times that I’m not concerned about these kind of things either way, but it comes up periodically.”

Yet things came to a head when the couple went out to dinner with friends and the other men in the group decided they would pay for the meal.

“Ben quietly said to me that he wasn’t really comfortable with the guys paying for his dinner so I said I’d chip in with the bill. Ben said thank you but could he chip in and then I could pay him back afterwards because he didn’t want them to know I was paying.

This struck me as totally absurd because firstly, it’s an unnecessary step, second even splitting the cost was something I wasn’t sure he would realistically be able to cover, and third I felt like he was trying to enter a p*ssing contest with my friends which was just childish,” the Redditor explained.

I said no I would just pay and then turned to everyone and said I’d chip in a third of the bill. No one batted an eyelid, but Ben was sulking.

Now the couple are at odds after Ben claimed that the poster “emasculated” him while she believes he’s being overdramatic.

Well, it seems the Redditor was in the right, or at least by the commenters’ standards, as they left her messages of support.

“Ben has an outdated and sexist vision of how couples should work in terms of who pays for what. And he is too focused on his public image. You probably need a deeper conversation with him about this,” penned one.

Another added, ” dated a guy like this and he would get so mad that I didn’t let the servers think he was paying. I told him to man up and get himself a decent job and he could pay all he wants, but that I wasn’t putting on a front to make him look better.”

While a third wrote, “If he wanted to pay the bill so badly, he should have done it. If he didn’t have the means at the moment, he should have kept quiet and accepted the gesture from the friends.”