You know, today is your lucky day, because I have a lot of feelings on letting people pay for me! let me just ask this first: do you even know this girl? Because the way you wrote this, it sounds a lot like you two don’t know each other from eve and you just popped up behind her all “hey girl hey, how you doin, those mushrooms are on me!” And yeah, actually, to be honest, that’s kind of fucked up if that’s how this went down. Because even though it’s stupid and like imaginary or whatever, money and love are intimately connected for a lot of us, and you can’t just throw either of them around and expect that it will feel normal for people.
I will occasionally pay for things for my close friends or family or loved ones, and it’s about love. When I buy your coffee for you, it’s a way of saying “The happiness that it brings me for you to have a cup of coffee and not even have had to get up from the table or think about it is worth more to me than the $2 it cost to buy it.” It’s an intimacy thing. So when you do something like that without asking or knowing the person or having that kind of relationship established, it feels kind of like having a stranger or your boss reach out and tenderly tuck a strand of hair behind your ear or something. Like, it’s not an inherently bad thing, but it’s not something you can do with just anyone, either. Maybe try googling “boundaries.”
And the other piece of it is this: honestly, sometimes even within those really close relationships, I don’t like having someone else pay for me, because I can’t shake the feeling that I somehow owe them something now, like I’m in their debt - not that they might want me to pay the $10 back, but that the moment of letting them do that for me will come back to bite me. I’ve refused to let people pay for me years into the relationship; I just don’t like feeling that sense of power imbalance. I work hard to support myself; I’ve had at least one job since I was 14, usually more than one, and it means a lot to me that I can pay my bills without help. So I don’t know for sure that your Whole Foods girl feels the same way, but if she does, then that’s a pretty scary thing to think about entering into with a total stranger, or even just someone she doesn’t know super well.
moral of the story is, it’s nice of you to try to help, but you can’t go through life deciding to play supergirl whenever it works for you and then get mad if other people don’t want your help. or you can, but who is that actually helping?
