Dating is a nuanced game where the prize and rules depend on the players involved.
For example, Reddit user NotYourCustodian’s co-worker is in it just for the free meals and drinks. So when he learned that his friend had matched with her on an app and was planning a night out, he informed the guy about her original intentions.
But when his colleague came back to work, she was furious about him sabotaging her dinner. Now, the Redditor is unsure if he did the right thing and asked the ‘Am I the [Jerk]?‘ community to help him make sense of the whole ordeal.
People date for different reasons, but this guy didn’t approve of his co-worker’s reason
Image credits: magesourcecurated / envanto (not the actual photo)
So when she matched with one of his buddies, he felt the need to step in
Image credits: Keira Burton / pexels (not the actual photo)
Image source: notyourcustodian
The phenomenon is called a “foodie call”
The practice of a person setting up a date with someone they are not romantically interested in for the sole purpose of getting a free meal is called a “foodie call.”
We even have research on it. The paper by Brian Collisson, Jennifer Howell, and Trista Harig of Azusa Pacific University and UC Merced appears in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.
For the first study, 820 women were recruited, with a median age of 34 years. 40% reported they were single, 33% married, and 27% said they were in a committed relationship but not married. Out of them, 85% identified as heterosexual, and they were the focus of this study.
The women answered a series of questions that measured their personality traits, beliefs about gender roles, and their foodie call history. Interestingly, they were also asked if they thought a foodie call was socially acceptable.
23% of women in this first group revealed they’d engaged in a foodie call — most did so occasionally or rarely. But while most women found foodie calls slightly to moderately unacceptable, those who had engaged in it perceived the activity as significantly more acceptable.
When the researchers followed up on their findings with their second study, they analyzed a similar set of questions of 357 heterosexual women and found that 33% had engaged in a foodie call.
“Several dark traits have been linked to deceptive and exploitative behavior in romantic relationships, such as one-night stands, faking an orgasm, or sending unsolicited sexual pictures,” Collisson said.
Their findings reaffirmed that. Upon further analysis, the social and personality psychology researchers discovered that women who scored high on the “dark triad” of personality traits (i.e., psychopathy, Machiavellianism, narcissism), as well as expressed traditional gender role beliefs, were most likely to engage in a foodie call and find it acceptable.
Collisson and Harig became interested in the subject of foodie calls after reading about the phenomenon in the news.
As for how many foodie calls might be occurring in the United States, Collisson said that can’t be inferred from the current research.
“They could be more prevalent, for instance, if women lied or misremembered their foodie calls to maintain a positive view of their dating history,” Collisson explained.
People virtually unanimously said the author of the post did nothing wrong
