Dating again: who pays, and the rest of it
These are the questions people will not ask out loud, and the reason they are hard to answer is not that they are embarrassing. It is that there is no research on any of them. Who pays, whether he collects her, when to sleep together — every source is a dating coach, a magazine column or an app’s marketing department. So this page does not hand you rules. It hands you the small number of things that are actually known, and a way to decide the rest.
We searched for a body of evidence on first-date etiquette and there is not one. Anybody telling you the rule — three dates, the man pays, wait ninety days — is telling you their preference in the voice of a finding. That includes the confident ones. Especially the confident ones.
Who pays
The only figure anyone has
a poll, not a studyThe single documented number we could find is an opinion poll: in a YouGov survey published in November 2017, 35 per cent of Americans said the man should always take care of the check. That is a poll of opinions about a norm, from nearly a decade ago. It is not a finding about what works, and we are labeling it that way rather than dressing it up.
Which means the honest answer is that a third of people think one thing and the rest do not, and you cannot know which third you are sitting opposite.
So the workable version, which is a manners question rather than a research question:
- Whoever asked, offers. It is the cleanest rule because it does not depend on anybody’s politics, and it scales to any pairing.
- Reach for your wallet anyway. The gesture is the content. Being visibly willing to pay and then being waved off costs nothing; not reaching at all is noticed by almost everyone.
- Pick somewhere you can afford without resenting it. A great many people come out of a divorce genuinely short of money and then arrange a dinner they cannot pay for. Coffee at eleven on a Saturday is a real date.
- Do not keep score across dates. If it is going anywhere, the arithmetic stops mattering quickly; if it is not, you have bought a couple of drinks.
- Say it out loud if it is awkward. “Shall we split it?” has never ended a promising evening.
Should he pick her up?
Meet there, the first few times
not etiquette, safetyThis one has an answer, and it is not about manners. Meet in a public place, get yourself there, and get yourself home. Not because the person is probably dangerous, but because giving a stranger your home address on the first evening is a decision you cannot take back, and there is no upside to it that could not wait a fortnight.
It applies to men as well, for a different reason: an accusation is as hard to undo as an address is.
If somebody treats that as an insult, they have told you something useful very cheaply. The people worth dating find it unremarkable.
Beyond the first few evenings it turns back into an ordinary courtesy question, and the answer is whatever you would do for a friend: offer, do not insist, and notice which they prefer.
Sex again
There is no correct number of dates
no evidence either wayWe looked. There is no research supporting three dates, or five, or ninety days, or any other interval. The rules exist because rules are easier to repeat than judgment.
What is true, and is worth more than a rule: for a lot of people the first time after a long marriage is emotionally much larger than they expected, and it arrives with grief attached, and often with a body they no longer recognize as the one that was chosen. None of that means it was a mistake. It usually means it was the first time in a very long time that the question was yours to answer.
- Decide before you go out, not at eleven at night. Not a vow — a position you have actually considered while sober and alone. People who have not thought about it default to whatever the other person wants, and then feel it was done to them.
- Test yourself: would you be all right if it went no further? If the honest answer is no, then the thing you want is not sex, and sex will not deliver it.
- Get tested, and expect nobody to raise it. Sexually transmitted infections are frequently symptomless, which is the whole reason testing exists as a separate act from noticing something. The CDC publishes annual surveillance by age band; we could not read the current tables in time to quote a figure for people over 45, so there is no number on this page. Assume you do not know your status until you have been tested, because that is simply true.
- Contraception is a conversation, not an assumption, including for people who have not needed to think about it in twenty years.
When to tell the children, and when to introduce anyone
This one has a real source, from a court rather than a coach.
“It is best not to introduce your new friend to your children until the relationship has become more stable and potentially serious.”
- And here is where we tell you it is our own view rather than a source. The stronger rule most family lawyers give — do not introduce anyone while the case is still running — has no official court or bar publication behind it that we could find, and we looked at the most likely candidate, Arizona’s parenting-time guide, which says nothing about dating at all. We think the rule is right. We are not going to pretend a court said it.
- What the research does say is about the number of transitions, not the timing of the first one. The decade-in-review literature finds that “transitions in parents’ relationships continue to be associated with reduced child well-being”. That is an argument for fewer introductions, not for a particular waiting period.
- There is no study establishing an optimal interval. We searched for one specifically. It does not exist, and every article giving you six months or a year made the number up.
New York State Parent Education and Awareness Program, Parent’s Handbook, “Dating and Your Children”, p. 6 (22 NYCRR Part 144); Raley, R.K. & Sweeney, M.M., “Divorce, Repartnering, and Stepfamilies: A Decade in Review”, Journal of Marriage and Family 82(1), 81–99 (2020).
Telling your ex
A custom, not a rule — with two exceptions
no evidenceThe convention is that the children should not be the ones who tell the other parent. It is a good convention and we found no research on whether it helps co-parenting; it is published here as a courtesy, not a finding.
The first exception is legal. If your decree or your county’s standing order contains a morality or paramour clause, what you do is not private. Some Texas counties impose one automatically the moment a divorce is filed — Bexar County’s standing order bars “anyone with whom the party is romantically involved” from staying overnight while the children are there. Dallas and Tarrant have no such clause. Read your own order before you assume. Dating while the case is still open covers the rest.
The second is safety. If there is any history of abuse or stalking, telling an ex about a new relationship is a disclosure with consequences, and the person to ask first is an advocate rather than a friend. Abuse and the divorce case, or the National Domestic Violence Hotline on 800-799-7233.
A few numbers, so you know what normal looks like
Pew Research Center, “Key findings about online dating in the U.S.” (2 February 2023) and “How Americans 50 and older use online dating sites and apps” (17 July 2023); US Census Bureau, “Remarriage in the United States” (2006).
Keep reading
- Dating again, and the law — adultery, cohabitation, custody, and what can be used against you
- Dating another divorcee — or someone who has never been married
- The apps, and who is actually on them
- Telling the children
- The body you are bringing to this
- Support groups and resources