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Looking back, that Italian dinner serves as a profound life lesson. Eric had provided all the surface-level elements of a romantic beginning—the flowers, the suits, the polite doors held open—but they were all hollow. It taught me that true generosity is never followed by an invoice, and courtesy is not a down payment on future compliance. Kindness loses its soul the moment it is treated as a line item on a balance sheet. I never paid that invoice, and I never saw Eric again. However, I did gain something valuable from that night: a sharpened intuition and the realization that a man who insists on paying for your dinner might just be trying to buy the right to own the evening. I didn’t pay the bill, but I certainly paid attention, and that has made all the difference in every date I’ve been on since.
