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Descriptively, I agree that a man who can't pay for dates would be much better served by getting to the point where he can pay for dates than by other areas to put effort in.
As to what should be, I'm neutral. A point I would make is that trad and modern male gender roles aren't a rejection of each other: they're largely the same, at least in terms of what women find attractive for a suitable partner. Here, it's the man pays. Even feminists have taken to justifying the norm with references to the pay gap/cost of makeup/dating risk.
What incels see is that the male gender role has the same responsibilities put on it as before, but with a weakened social basis for men to fulfill it. The hollowing out of the middle class, the fetishization of bureaucratic over productive roles, various cultural norms.
And, without the ability to achieve enough masculinity to attract a mate, they give up altogether and turn into passive, pathetic creatures. Who won't be leading a revolution or even stochastic violence higher than noise level.
Certainly there are many women who insist on men paying for dates using this formula, but I believe the sort of women who make references to the pay gap/cost of makeup/dating risk as reasons for men to pay for everything on dates are too self-oriented and men who have self-respect should not date them. I say the same for men who complain about paying for dates, excepting situtations in which the sorts of dates women are expecting are genuinely excessive -- particularly when it's excessive for their social class. Worthwhile women do not whine about men not paying for dates, and worthwhile men do not whine about paying for them.
Men and women who care about each other should each pay a portion towards their dates in accordance with their ability to pay and interest in a particular subject. Going to a woman's favorite restaurant on her birthday? Maybe treat her to it. Going to see Cheesy Romantic Comedy 8? Maybe she should buy his ticket. Watching Action Sci-Fi 11? He should buy. But ultimately if you're breaking your relationship down into a list of debts that must be transactionally repaid, your relationship is worth shit, and you should either make it worth more than that or end it. Love pays debts, owing nothing; forgives debts, losing nothing.
As a more moderate socialcon, I'm a strong proponent of partnership-based relationships, where the people in them view each other as fundamentally teammates in facing the highs and the lows of life -- you know, "for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer." @ProfQuirrell had a wonderful description of how such a partnership should operate. (And I hope his marriage is better than his namesake's partnership with his, um, other half.)
My view would be that men and women need to contribute towards their relationship in meaningful ways. That can be they both pitch in monetarily, that can be one tends to pay and the other tends to the garden, that can be one cooks and the other sweeps the floor, that can be one works a 9-5 and the other watches the kids. It depends on the couple, their strengths and their needs.
Obviously this is a bit of conservatism being liberalism driving the speed limit. But we're at a point where even the normal and healthy give-and-take that characterizes healthy human relationships is missing from people's expectations. And that's wrong, terribly wrong, horrifically wrong, daemonically wrong. We crossed a line that isn't just non-traditional, it's actively destructive.
Find someone who doesn't see you as a piggy bank or a cum depository. If you can't do that, you're either dating too 'high' or dating in the wrong place. Kind, caring, warm people exist. But the unfortunate thing for people dating later in life is this group is usually taken early, because their standards are realistic and their approach to relationships invites commitment.
I liked your reply and the link to @ProfQuirrell's post.
The key truth in both, I think, can be distilled to "prioritize the collective success of the marriage above your own day-to-day wants." Excellent and actionable advice.
My concern is that society is now insanely hyper-individualized with focus on direct personal success. It's one of those things that so endemic it's almost hard to notice (fish in water sort of thing) and then, once one does notice, its ubiquity is mind boggling.
Corporations are boiled down to a single CEO making everything happen. Political candidates are portrayed as singularly responsible not only for their own success but for driving the success of their party. Forget celebrities and sports starts - not even worth it.
I think the sad fact of the matter is that in the majority of western marriages, a rocky patch is seen by one or both partners as the other person becoming an albatross to individual success and/or happiness in life. It isn't "we're messing up our marriage," it's "Bob/Alice is now an adversary to my happy life journey." Once that thinking tanks root, divorce is just a timestamp away.
This is my biggest problem with anglosphere society, and I believe it's rooted in the broader sense of individualism and freedom that people often praise in America. I wonder very frequently whether these are actually the factors that have made America wealthy, or if it's actually just the privileged economic and military position of the country due to the World Wars. Individualism and freedom are destructive to community and purpose. Say what you will about the socialist realists, but at least they had an ethos!
There was a scene in The Crown where they dramatized what they thought might have been the conversation between Queen Elizabeth and (then the) Duke of Edinburgh Philip. This conversation took place after some alleged infidelity on the part of Philip, which the dramatization was incredibly coy about. Not sure what the reality looked like, but I'm specifically talking about the dramatization and would make the same point even if the story were entirely fictional. It went like this:
Without endorsing (fictionalized) Philip's misconduct that got them into this situation, I'd say there's a real kernel of value in this -- if you see your marriage as indissoluble, you begin to see fixing your marriage as a task you must collaborate on and compromise in order to accomplish. Obviously this requires that both parties are actually discussing in good faith, want to fix the marraige, and anyone who has done wrong is willing to make amends; in situations where there is no remorse, no respect, and no resolution, there must be dissolution. If the ring won't fit, you two must split. If they're both out to plunder, let it be torn asunder.
But I firmly believe there are far fewer of those than most people, in our "divorce is adult breakup" age, believe. And the reasons for ending such a significant long-term relationship, on the part of both men and women, are often incredibly petty. Marital therapy often serves not to let both partners release their goblins and find a path forward, but for one partner to ally with a sympathetic authority figure in order to bully the other into submission. And that's not a marriage, it's a sublimated cuck(old)(queen) fantasy.
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I think this is just conservatism flat out being liberalism, as in "secure personalities that will insist upon their own idiosyncrasies, but in the context of any given relationship spend their time more interested in the other's well-being than themselves".
Which in turn leads to "driving the speed limit" phenomenon, because these people also tend to take time to investigate corruption rather than have a fast-path moral stance that rejects it on its face. Because that's what they'd do for anyone else. (Of course, that ability to have a moral stance also creates corruption on its own, so you get one or the other- which is why we notice that the further from 'secure human being' we get, the faster they are to moralize... which is not generally meaningfully distinct from just looking out for number one in the way they do this).
The more I think about this, the more I think transactionality of this type is optimistically cargo-culting the want to worry you're not contributing enough, or more cynically going through the motions. I also think that this is one of those things that people who already do this as second nature (i.e. making sure I'm not pulling too hard on the relationship's finances) probably shouldn't talk about openly, since if you describe doing this to someone who doesn't have love backing it up/informing their choices it's likely going to damage [what little of] the relationship they had by implementing this.
And some people are going to be more attentive to this than others, because that's just the way they are (this is what I hear in the "Paul bemoans men getting married because they'll be more focused on pleasing their wives than pleasing God" [if I'm remembering that correctly]- I figure he must be talking about these kinds of people since traditionalist men don't truly prioritize what will please their wife [as an end] to begin with, and vice versa for progressive women), and conversely some people are going to be more interested/invested in what society says about that than reality. What's worse is that it's going to generally be incumbent on the partner that society currently privileges to countermand that messaging, so currently it's going to be harder on the woman when it comes to developing the man and his sons [pressure enforced by peers] than vice versa.
We used to be richer. When some non-secure personalities are given financial stability it tends to make them into better people, or rather, allow their better traits to be expressed. (This can also happen if you give them a goal.)
We're poorer now, so we can't afford that, hence we get more pathological/corrupt behavior. The power imbalance favors women this time, which is why "see men as piggy banks" dominates "see women as cum depositories" in popular messaging.
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