We're In a Hospitality Drought

Or, Venmo & DoorDash Are Killing Romance

Dinner at a friend’s apartment - San Francisco, CA

Never have I experienced hospitality as gracious as what I experienced while visiting my “in-laws” in a coastal town in the southwest Karnataka state of India. After a bumpy 90-minute drive from the airport, we were welcomed to the house with cheers and applause, and the luggage in our hands was promptly replaced with fresh coconut water. Fruit was sliced, chairs were given up, clean clothes were offered, and I never got the chance to see the bottom of my plate, as it was constantly being replenished with warm food.

After dinner, my boyfriend and I were driven to a hotel booked on our behalf, unbeknownst to us. I chased after the family members as they carried my roller bag and backpack to the lobby and checked into the room for us, as my boyfriend and I don’t speak the local language. After ensuring we were settled in our room, we were told to call if we needed anything and that we would be picked up at 7 AM for breakfast.

When the hotel door finally shut, I found myself laughing - out of surprise and out of gratitude. I’d never been received so warmly by a family I had just met. There was a lightness and gracefulness with which they danced around the house, moving chairs, preparing coffee, and creating conversation - this ritual of greeting and welcoming certainly wasn’t unfamiliar to them. There wasn’t any explicit expectation of reciprocity - us simply being there was a gift, we were constantly reassured. It was the kind of kindness that you almost feel guilty for experiencing, particularly as you just sit there, stinky in your travel clothes.

I hope and plan to return the hospitality if and when the family visits my town. Until then, I’ve made an effort to pay their generosity forward towards my guests. Their philosophy of hosting and entertaining happens to be similar to mine in many ways. I recently hosted a friend from New York and made sure she had nary a dirty towel or an empty water glass. When I host friends for dinner, they aren’t allowed in the kitchen - I set them on the couch with a drink in hand, while a candle burns and music plays, and we chat while I prepare the food. Fresh sheets, a new tube of toothpaste, a bed made and unmade, home-cooked meals - this is how you show love.

After developing a habit of hosting this way, your heart begins to feel as full performing these acts of service as it does when they’re enacted for you. There’s just one thing that squashes the romance of such a ritual, and it’s something we’ve all experienced, perhaps after picking up a coffee for a friend or after attending a dinner party at someone’s house or enjoying a lively weekend brunch. The request comes down like a cartoon anvil on one’s skull: How much do I owe you? Can you Venmo me? I requested you for the coffee. I uploaded the receipt to Splitwise. Nothing extinguishes the warm flame of love and friendship quite like the mention of a payment service. A sharp thrust from the tender tradition of entertaining into the cold, seamless world of modernity.

My snack spread last New Year’s Eve for friends and family - Seattle, WA

Payment apps like Venmo and Zelle certainly have their place. Paying someone from Facebook Marketplace for a piece of used furniture. Repaying a friend for an airplane ticket, concert ticket, your share of lodging for a vacation, your portion of a large group dinner, or some other hefty expense. Taxi services. Farmer’s market vendors. These are all situations and venues wherein a payment app like Venmo is beautifully convenient.

Apart from honest payment for a good or service or a repayment for a high-ticket item, Venmo should have no regular place in a close relationship. Yet it still finds its way onto the tips of everyone’s tongues, sometimes before the check has even reached the table.

The first installment of the second season of Delia Cai’s “Hate Read” newsletter was released just as this piece began percolating in my mind. Coincidentally, the first essay was about the pitfalls of “Venmo culture,” in which the anonymous writer posits that there’s no reason why friends in their thirties making six figures should be “nickel-and-dime-ing [their] loved ones in pursuit of saving $9.”

The pseudonymous “Nicola Dime” makes a stipulation or two - one of which is that it makes sense to pay more precisely if you’re younger and strapped for cash. “In our twenties? Sure. I’d pay for mine and you’d pay for yours, because our orders reflected exactly the particular constraints of our early-in-adulthood finances,” they write. However, as one grows into their career and their earnings begin to reflect that, there’s no reason for them to be miserly at the dinner table, as it erodes the trust that underpins close and casual friendships alike.

I’ll officially enter my mid-twenties later this year - a period in one’s life wherein financial disparity among friends becomes most glaring, arguably. Within one’s mid-twenties, one begins to realize who is working for money and who is working for sport. Those who had financial support in college and launched into full-time jobs after school are beginning to accumulate savings, which are going towards investments and trips to Italy and Japan. Part of my social media feed is full of software engineers and consultants sipping company-comped cocktails on city rooftops. Others are still in school, pursuing advanced degrees. Others are waitressing and bartending and gig-working while pursuing an artistic career or while searching for something more “secure.” Others are floating, drifting, chilling. Backpacking through mountain ranges, doing a bit of this and that. It’s not so clear whose dime people are doing things on, but at this age, it doesn’t entirely matter yet - everyone still has a year or so until they’re kicked off their parents’ insurance plans.

The point being: the mid-twenties are a time of great financial instability for many and a time when others are beginning to glimpse a semblance of “security,” or at least glimpse the ladder that will carry them to that shakily promised land. However, even among those who are “financially secure,” there’s a tendency to exact absolute fairness when it comes to friendship finances. A fairness that extends beyond simply splitting the dinner check evenly. I’ve witnessed people ask their friends to Venmo them an extra $10 or so to account for a slightly more expensive entree. I’ve been asked by a friend to Venmo request them $4 for an ice cream cone. I’ve been asked how my cohabiting boyfriend and I ensure we’re splitting groceries “evenly.” I’ve even seen someone - granted, someone much younger than me - ask a friend to pay several dollars of utility fees after taking a shower at their apartment.

Prep for hamburger night at an Airbnb with friends - Santa Barbara, CA

All of this reminds me of a Reddit post that went viral several years ago in which someone shared a story about waiting upstairs at their Swedish friend’s house while the friend ate dinner with their family downstairs. NYT and NPR think pieces abounded, with many Swedish defensively chiming in to speak to the “independent” nature of Swedish culture and how feeding others’ children may be seen as a critique of the other person’s family not being able to support them.

“Swedengate,” as it was called, reminds me of the hospitality norms particular to the United States. Of course, the United States is a broad, heterogeneous country with countless pockets of variation. Still, it’s famously an “independent” nation. An individualist country, in which singular people - or singular nuclear family units - are expected to support themselves with little to no help from their immediate community or larger state. The money that one earns in the free market is theirs to safeguard, hoard, and spend as they please - as are the goods and assets they’re able to procure. If one wants a seat at a dinner table they don’t belong to, they ought to contribute - or at least, symbolically contribute. As an elementary schooler, on weekends away with my friends’ families, I recall my parents tucking bills of cash into my duffel bag, which I was instructed to give to my friend’s parents as a “thank you” for hosting me. Some parents refused my contribution but expressed graciousness for my willingness to pay. Others pocketed the cash without a second thought.

The United States also boasts its liberal tradition of instating “equality” and restoring “justice” - righting wrongs that the country itself authored. It’s a tradition that can mingle disagreeably with millennials’ and elder Gen Z’s tendency to self-indulge, staring at their reflection in the computer screen as Narcissus stared longingly at his mirror image in a pool of water. They’re the Buzzfeed culture, the Girl Boss culture, the culture of cutting off toxic people. Millennials and elder Gen Z are a culture unafraid to hold people accountable - especially people who have wronged them personally.

They’re also a culture that not only prioritizes but expects efficiency. A meal at your doorstep and a car outside your apartment in minutes. The seamless generation, the contactless generation. A culture of expediency. And payment services are the perfect amalgamation of these values: individualism, equality, and ease. They are tools that allow for the exact enactment of these values - you’re able to widdle “equality” down to the cent. You’re able to establish a digital ledger between yourself and your friends, enabling push notifications to alert others of their debt to you. None of this would have been possible twenty years ago.

Banana split shared with friends - Los Angeles, CA

In November, I posited that love shouldn’t be a marketplace but an orchestra - Venmo culture couldn’t be a better example of the former. Expecting every relationship to be a perfectly balanced see-saw will always leave one feeling grossly disappointed. Requesting someone $10 doesn’t give that person assurance that you will have their back when the going gets tough. Those who never give will always take. In a world of “I’m at my emotional capacity” and “Drop it off at the door,” there is some beauty in trusting that someone will get your coffee next time if they care about you like they say they do. There’s beauty in the promise of seeing someone again. In making the smallest of sacrifices to show someone you care, trusting that the universe will realign the scale again, somehow.

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