I was meeting Rebecca for lunch uptown, a cute little hole-in-the-wall café called That & Hop. She had a grilled ham and cheese sandwich, and I had a tomato bisque. At the end the server came by and dropped off the check on the side of the table, midway between us. I was going to reach inside my purse, but barely did my arm twitch before she looked me dead in the eye and said one word:

“No.”

For a moment I stared into her steely eyes, my friend suddenly turned adversary in the presence of a silly piece of paper. The rest of the world faded from peripheral view, and the only things left were us and the table. Two women locked in a battle of determination, our brows furled, our cheeks unfading. Should I counter her No, and unzip my purse in a grand gesture of defiance?

But she was way ahead of me, credit card already in hand, and as she placed it on the check-tray, my resolve withered and the world, server and wall paintings and windowsill foliage and all, came rushing back into existence.

“Thank you,” she said to the server. She smiled genially, in full unspoken awareness that she had won, and I had lost, the latest Who Pays For The Check skirmish.

One of the things I have learned about myself is that more often than not, I tend to lose my WPFTC skirmishes. I have lately been uncomfortable with this fact. People will insist on paying for me, and I haven’t the skill to stop them.

How do I learn to win WPFTC skirmishes? Is it a matter of not backing down in the face of generosity? Is it a matter of already having your credit card at the ready, and being more prepared than your friend to pounce on the check? If she insists, can I insist harder? Is this something I can practise, a kind of Generosity Combat where I can improve with experience?

Why does it even work this way? Why are we competing to be the one who pays for the check, instead of, you know, competing to be the one who doesn’t pay for the check?

My impression is that in order to be a Fine Upstanding Member of Society, you should aim to give more than you get. Paying for the check is how you build a reputation, and so offering to pay for the check is an implicit admission that you judge the worth of the Reputation Points you would earn to outstrip the monetary value that you would otherwise be saving. In effect, you are making a bid to buy cheap Reputation.

This also suggests that richer people should offer to pay the check more often, and poorer people less often. If you’re poor, you need cold hard cash more than you need reputation. Reputation is a nebulous intangible social thing, but you can’t feed a family with it. And rich people have more money than they need, so it makes sense for them to chase Reputation instead.

And if two people are roughly equal in wealth or class or such, like me and Rebecca, then winning WPFTC skirmishes is a way to establish where Power lies.