Photo: @clarkepeoples / Instagram / @claaarke / TikTok
She posted the interaction to Twitter but, after laying out the facts, no one took her side.
By Megan Quinn — Written on Apr 12, 2023
A woman has sparked a heated discussion about etiquette for asking someone out on a date.
After she was asked out for drinks and dinner by a man on Hinge, she slammed his lack of effort when it came to planning their night. However, the woman did not receive the support she was anticipating.
The man asked the woman out on a date to a restaurant that was ‘an hour’ away from where she lived.
Clarke, a content creator based in New York City, shared her negative experience of being asked out on the popular dating app Hinge on her TikTok and Twitter accounts.
According to her Hinge profile, the “best way” to ask her out is by “opening with a time and place… let’s save the small talk for dinner!”
One man whom she matched with decided to do just that. “7:30 drinks next Thursday at FourFiveSix in East Williamsburg?” he asks Clarke.
However, she was less than impressed by the man’s efforts.
“I’ll bet $100 that bar is down the street from your apartment in Williamsburg and you didn’t give any consideration to the fact that I live on the West side of Manhattan,” she fired back.
The man defended himself, claiming that he believed Clarke would like to go somewhere she’s never been to before.
“You’d win $100 on that first part, but I took that all into consideration: I figured you probably don’t come out to East Williamsburg too often, next Thursday is gonna be gorgeous, and this bar has a nice outdoor section,” he wrote.
He includes his phone number for Clarke in case she changes her mind about him being “inconsiderate.”
She gave the man an 'F for effort' rating.
“F for effort in asking me to travel an hour to have a drink with you at a place two blocks from your home,” Clarke shared. “As if Manhattan doesn’t have patios?!”
Additionally, she claims that he lost points for only asking her out for drinks so that he could “spend less money” and for asking to go out at night so that he could bring her back to his house afterward.
Clarke also took to her TikTok account to criticize the man’s taste in first date bars.
In a video that has been viewed nearly 300,000 times in 24 hours, she shares photos of the outdoor bar patio in question. “This looks like the Salvation Army opened up a lounge with all of the furniture nobody bought in 1984,” she says.
While she claims to have “no shade” toward the restaurant, Clarke believes that the man could have chosen a patio bar that was a fair distance from both of them so that she would not be the only one having to travel a long way.
“Even if it is the most beautiful bar in the world, how inconsiderate is it for you to ask a woman to travel so far out of her way to meet you at a place that you literally could spit on from the window of your bedroom?” she presses.
However, many people did not see the issue with the man asking Clarke out on a date to a bar closer to him.
Many of them called her out for not making it clear that she did not want to travel beyond her neighborhood for a date.
“Does your [Hinge bio] say that you refuse to leave your neighborhood? Why live in New York if the biggest problem here is not wanting to take a train or an Uber to a different neighborhood? Sounds really closed-minded and like a red flag!” one Twitter user pointed out.
Others criticized Clarke for failing to suggest an alternative location that was a fair distance from both of them. “He didn’t do anything wrong. You shouldn’t have matched with him unless you were interested enough to provide an alternative spot,” another user noted.
Clarke clapped back by responding with her own tweets and addressing her beliefs in her TikTok video.
“Y’all miss the point every time,” she wrote in a tweet. “I would maybe even travel the hour if he was traveling even 30 minutes. It’s about him not even trying to meet halfway or close to it by suggesting a place I have to trek to but he can see from his front door.”
She also believes that she “shouldn’t have had to provide an alternative” location since the man should have taken where she lived into consideration before suggesting the bar.
Clarke argues that the man had one intention only with her by asking her out somewhere that was only two blocks from his place and many women will be able to crack the code: he wanted to bring her back to have sex with her.
“It is a very smart [move] if you are a guy who wants to get a girl far away from where she lives but super close to you to y’all can have a drink on Grandma’s sofa and then walk back to your place afterward because you wanna get some,” she says.
Other men confirmed that Clarke’s thought process was most likely correct.
“That dude was trying to give himself the home court advantage and take her back to his spot after. That’s all that suggestion was about,” one man on Twitter pointed out.
“If a man really digs a gal, he’ll go to her. If he thinks she’s desperate and wants to use her, he will want her to go to him. No exceptions!” another man wrote.
Clarke argues that she is someone who has “the most basic standards” for men she wants to date. She believed that it was not too much to ask of the man to suggest a place that was a good midpoint between the both of them where they could meet up for a first date. She encourages her other female followers to hold acceptable standards for themselves and to never settle for a man just to have a companion and hopes that her story will serve as a clear lesson of that.
“To be clear, you WILL find someone who cares enough to meet you halfway,” Clarke shares. We certainly hope that she meets her certain someone and someone who goes above and beyond her standards soon.
Megan Quinn is a writer at YourTango who covers entertainment and news, self, love, and relationships.