There's a particular feeling tied to not knowing if your card will decline at checkout. Hand in hand with your girlfriend, it’s date night, and you have one thing on your mind: money.
You and your partner decide to go out to dinner. It’s a sit-down restaurant, not too expensive but not too cheap either. The type where you order at the front, with the menu on the wall, and an impatient cashier watching you dig for your phone from the back pocket of your jeans. As your girlfriend scans the room for an open table, one of your hands stays in hers. The other opens your banking app. You quickly check that she isn’t looking, as you turn down the brightness and transfer $50 from your savings into your checking account before you pay for the meal. As you tap your phone to pay, you say, “I got it,” like it's nothing–but it’s not nothing. Weren’t you supposed to be saving money?
For a generation of young adults, dating has become a financial calculation running quietly in the background. Behind every date, meal, and “I got it,” every purchase feels like a critical hit to your personal savings. With increased costs of rent, gas, and groceries, society still expects us to perform the romance and stereotypical gender roles of a different economy. When affection has a price tag and being a good partner means being a good provider, is love still a relationship, or is being in love a bad financial decision?
In the face of financial instability and a society that polices the gender roles of a past economy, love under capitalism comes with terms and conditions. It’s a quiet kind of dystopia with no villain, no dramatic societal collapse, but a basic human need with a price tag.
A Harris Poll for the Guardian found that 95% of Americans believe that the US is undergoing an affordability crisis, and about half say they’re struggling to afford groceries and gas themselves. For a young adult seeking a romantic relationship, that insecurity can feel heightened, particularly when gender roles are reinforced, and the responsibility of being a good partner means providing for them when you can.
A study in the National Library of Medicine by Peetz and colleagues found that greater financial worry made people see their partners as less supportive during arguments. The overarching theme of money and love can strain many relationships regardless of sexuality and gender, but traditional gender roles put extra weight on men to provide, on top of shared money stress.
The provider script in a heterosexual relationship is the most visible version of this, but it’s not the only one. Regardless of sexual orientation or gender, you’re marketed the same idea: that a good relationship is something you can purchase and prove. From date nights, aesthetic Instagram couple pictures, rings, bae-cations, and dating apps to find “the one,” all carry the same message: love is a lifestyle with a price of entry.
The pressure to keep up doesn’t fall on men or women alone; it falls on everyone trying to afford to be wanted.
For Gen Z looking for love in today's market, dating apps like Hinge, Tinder, and Bumble come to mind. In a generation glued to their screens, many of us feel more disconnected than ever. With ‘swiping fatigue’ on the rise, 65% of dating apps downloaded in 2024 were deleted within a month and rose to 69% in 2025, noted by AppsFlyer.
Regardless of the methods used to find your new bae, looking for love is expensive. According to the BMO Real Financial Progress Index for 2026, the average date costs $189 for Americans who spend money on dating. That includes transportation, getting ready, and the cost of the actual date, like food, drinks, or tickets.
“Date-flation,” a term used to describe the price increase of dating during inflation, explains how a lot of us in the dating scene are feeling. Taking first place with the highest average cost per date and one-year increase are millennials; second are Gen Z daters. CNBC reports that Millennials are spending $252 on a date, up from $191, and Gen Z spend up to $205 per date, up from $194.
The experience of dating and relationships feels like a product you must buy in order to feel love. The lifestyle of love feels expensive, and a lot of us feel it. As we live in a capitalist society, we feel this increased pressure. But love felt transactional long before dating apps, and long before capitalism.
Most of human history has been about survival, family, and economic production. For survival, one’s choice of marital partner was about producing offspring and wealth for both families. Marriage was more of an act of how well you could produce together to ensure more children to partake in child labor on your farm. According to historian Stephanie Coontz, economists called marriage “complementary productive human capital,” as noted by the Fraser Institute. What’s different now isn’t that love has a cost; it’s that the cost is sold back to us as romance. Love has always been transactional in some shape or form; just now it’s packaged as romantic rather than economical.
We may not be getting into relationships for the sake of bearing children to work on our farms these days, but marital relationships were tied to who could work on land and have children, which made romantic relationships a luxury that a lot of people couldn’t afford.
No matter what our dating status is, from single to taken, we all deserve love in some shape or form. Would love look any different if we weren’t constrained by the economic pressure and expectations of society? If honest role-sharing, gender norms, wages, and cost of living weren’t barriers to our access to romance? A love that doesn’t feel like a subscription, but an act of honesty and devotion, without strong financial barriers that limit us?
As you wait in line to pay for your next meal, you lower your brightness before you transfer money to your checking account. You anxiously wait for your card to go through; we forget that romance often takes time, patience, honesty, and devotion. In a society filled with financial insecurity, we get tied up in the idea that love has a price of entry, rather than a human desire that existed long before capitalism.
Works Cited:
Currency Image. (n.d.). Pinterest. https://i.pinimg.com/736x/02/8e/45/028e4517d11f7db2f51cdb5b7a382d5a.jpg
De Andrada, V. (2025, November 24). Gen Z is ghosting dating apps: Could AI win them back? Fast Company. https://www.fastcompany.com/91443225/gen-z-is-ghosting-dating-apps-could-ai-win-them-back
Gupta, G. (2026, July 7). Half of Americans struggle to afford groceries and gas, exclusive poll finds. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jul/07/cost-of-living-poll-groceries-gas
How capitalism made marriage (not Valentine’s Day) about love. (n.d.). Fraser Institute. https://www.fraserinstitute.org/commentary/how-capitalism-made-marriage-not-valentines-day-about-love
Morabito, C. (2026, May 23). Millennials spend $252 on an average date, BMO finds — and social media is spiraling over “date-flation.” CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/23/date-flation-average-millennial-date-costs-252.html
Peetz, J., Fisher-Skau, O., & Joel, S. (2024). How individuals perceive their partner’s relationship behaviors when worrying about finances. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 41(6), 1577–1599. https://doi.org/10.1177/02654075241227454
Peetz, J., Fisher-Skau, O., & Joel, S. (2024). How individuals perceive their partner’s relationship behaviors when worrying about finances. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 41(6), 1577–1599. https://doi.org/10.1177/02654075241227454