Gen Z Is Too Broke to Date and Honestly, Same

The $150 Date That's Killing Romance

The New York Times has been running pieces about the death of dating due to cost, and The Guardian's Dave Schilling decided to weigh in with a column that manages to be both genuinely funny and quietly devastating about the state of modern romance in an economy that has turned even a casual dinner into a financial commitment requiring pre-approval.

Schilling's framing is the right one: dating is gambling. You spend real money, there are no guaranteed returns, and the house always wins. The difference is that at a casino, the free drinks are part of the deal. On a first date in 2026, you're splitting a $22 cocktail with someone who may or may not text you back.

When One Person Has Money and the Other Definitely Does Not

Schilling gets at the actually painful part of all this, which isn't two broke people going on cheap dates together. Two broke people can go to a free museum. Two broke people can split a pizza. That's fine. That's cute, even.

The ugly situation, as he describes from personal experience, is the income gap date. The scenario where one person is doing okay and the other is a self-described "broke writer" watching their savings crater while their partner graciously insists it's fine that she's picking up every check. It is not fine. Everyone in that scenario knows it is not fine. The reassurance only makes it worse.

Schilling cop to being the freeloader in that arrangement, which is a level of self-awareness most people would rather die than publish under their own name. Respect, genuinely.

The Loneliness Influencer Industrial Complex

Here's where it gets darker. Schilling mentions that he previously wrote a column urging young people not to give up on love, specifically warning them away from "loneliness influencers" who sell isolation as a personality. He now sounds slightly less sure of that advice, which tells you something about how bad things have gotten.

There is a genuinely growing content economy built around convincing young people that being alone is actually a conscious, empowered lifestyle choice rather than a structural outcome of an economy that has made basic social participation unaffordable. When a $150 dinner is the cultural expectation for a first date, and your rent just went up again, opting out stops looking like a personal failure and starts looking like rational behavior. The influencers didn't create the conditions. They just monetized them.

The Cheap Date Manifesto Nobody Asked For

To his credit, Schilling does not wallow. He makes the obvious point that plenty of zero-cost or low-cost date options exist: free museums, parks, beaches, art galleries. His more surreal suggestions include riding an elevator up and down in a large building to see if sparks fly, or standing outside a restaurant for thirty minutes without ever going in.

These are absurd examples, but his underlying point is solid. A date is just a structured opportunity to figure out if you like someone. The venue is largely a pretense. Two people stuck in traffic on the Los Angeles freeway together can learn more about each other's character in forty-five minutes than they would over a hundred-dollar meal where everyone is performing.

The problem is that the cultural script around dating still treats expensive dinners as the baseline signal of serious intent. Suggesting a walk in the park on a first date reads, to many people, as low-effort. Which is insane, but here we are.

Should You Just Wait Until You Can Afford It?

Some corners of the internet insist that you simply should not date if you are unemployed or financially unstable. Lock yourself away, sort your life out, then rejoin society once your savings account looks presentable. Schilling notes the logic of this without fully endorsing it.

The problem, as he points out, is that there is never a good time. Nobody ever fully has it figured out. If you wait for financial stability before pursuing connection, you may be waiting for a signal that the current economy has no intention of sending anytime soon. For a generation dealing with student debt, housing costs that have eaten half their income, and a job market that keeps inventing new ways to be precarious, "get stable first" is not advice. It's a door that isn't there.