The Economics of Dating: What We Can Learn From Transactional Relationships

Love has always been part fairytale, part fine print. We like to think it’s spontaneous, magnetic, and wild, but beneath the breathlessness, it’s often governed by rules as structured as a spreadsheet. And nowhere is this clearer than in the shift from online dating to long-term commitment. What feels like chemistry has become frequently contract. What we call romance, psychologists and economists quietly file under please see clause 4.1, subsection: giving head.

The Dating Tax 

These days, being taken out to dinner feels less like a date and more like swiping your body against a card machine. The implied cost? Dessert, followed by sex. Online dating has become a micro-economy in itself, as swipe culture has gamified attraction, while everyone keeps calculating their return on erection. Men calculate what they’re “owed” after picking up the bill for dinner, drinks, and even an Uber. Meanwhile, women calculate whether the effort of makeup, conversation, and emotional buffering is worth the steak and his TED Talk about Inception. We’ve replaced courtship with cost-per-conversion. How romantic.

If dinner buys sex, maybe sex buys loyalty. But loyalty itself is rarely unconditional. It’s an ever running balance sheet: hot versus annoying, rich versus emotionally constipated, ambitious versus absent. Like SaaS, you can trial the free version (casual dating) and only upgrade once the product hits enough KPIs: emotional support, adequate green flags, decent dick game. By the time you reach marriage, the transaction has scaled. We’re no longer trading orgasms for omelettes but negotiating joint mortgages, fertility timelines, and whether to spend Christmas with the weird aunt. Marriage, stripped of lace, is risk management. Prenups are heartbreak insurance policies, with exclusions buried in the fine print. So it’s not that love isn’t real, but rather that it’s rarely the only item on the spreadsheet. 

The Cost of Emotional Bankruptcy

Psychologists have long tracked the quiet calculations we run in our heads, often without noticing. Social Exchange Theory, one of the foundations of relationship psychology, suggests that most of us approach romance like an investment portfolio: we stay when the rewards outweigh the costs, and we leave when a better deal comes along. Alan Fiske’s Relational Models Theory makes it even clearer. Some relationships run on communal norms where you give freely, and there are no scoreboard. Others, especially at the start, feel more transactional. Think measured exchanges, proportional returns, and running the occasional refund policy if your date starts quoting Ben Shapiro.

Economists have been circling the same terrain for decades, but with regression models instead of roses. In a now-classic paper, Matouschek and Rasul (2008) describe marriage as a commitment device: a mechanism to make leaving harder, raise the costs of betrayal, and nudge both partners toward cooperation under the threat of mutually assured destruction. In practice, marriage often functions as an invisible contract where both decide on who cooks, who earns, and who puts their dreams in a drawer to raise the kids. These aren’t listed in a contract, but you can feel the breach when someone defaults on their unspoken clause. Especially when they forget your birthday and the child’s football game. This is why divorce laws matter so much. When divorce is easy and cheap, more people gamble on marriage, but also walk away faster. When it’s expensive, people hesitate. Love becomes less about “following your heart” and more like asking, “Do I stand him enough to split my pension?” All of which brings us back to the uncomfortable truth: whether you’re casually dating or five years into a marriage that now resembles a poorly performing mutual fund, the transaction never disappears — only the packaging changes. In early dating, the expectations are almost comically clear: dinner, drinks, sex, maybe brunch if you’re lucky. But in marriage, they become layered under ritual, routine, resentment, and the slow accrual of emotional debt. There’s no invoice, but there’s always a bill.

A Risk Premium on Female Autonomy

But the most fascinating part isn’t even the economics (though I’ll admit, few things get me hotter than a well-timed tax deduction). It’s the psychological framing, and more specifically, how women are perceived when they acknowledge the transaction. When females openly state their terms — say she wants money, security, or attention in exchange for her time, sex, or devotion — she is labelled cold, manipulative, or transactional. What a bitch! But when she marries a man for financial stability, raises his children, manages his family calendar, and reminds him for the fifth time that his urologist appointment is on Tuesday, then we call it love. Madonna vs. Gold Digger: the boxing match of the century, sponsored by societal hypocrisy.

That’s why this industry, myself included, is so unapologetically blunt: we charge for our time, tipping optional. People love to argue that dating, marriage, and companionship work aren’t comparable, because one involves “free will” and the others don’t. And sure, depending on which pleasure parlor you move through, that may be true. But most of the women I’ve met on the upper end of the spectrum do choose who they see, even if the reason for choosing is payment. And exactly here lies the paradox: society says women should have freedom to choose, but only if their choices are humble. If she picks her partner for love, selflessness, or spiritual alignment, we declare her as virtuous. However, if the motive is financially oriented, suddenly it’s fetch-the-crucifix time! All the cultural, psychological, and economic nuance disappears in a puff of smoke, and we’re right back to moral policing. Meanwhile, men are often celebrated for their partner choices: beauty, fertility, and a banging body. I’m exaggerating, of course (well, sort of). But if you’ve read my piece on AI models, this is where you should raise your finger and say: “Khloé, this is not our fault, this is simply evolution!” You’re right, sweetheart. You’re very right.

Let’s consult Darwin for a moment (yes, the evolution guy). In his world, female preferences weren’t romantic whims but simply risk management strategies. Women weren’t swooning over status for sport; they were selecting for survival. A strong, stable mate meant protection, resources, and ideally, someone who wouldn’t ghost after the placenta hit the cave floor. The cost of labour? Berries, firewood, and maybe a daisy-chain engagement ring if he was feeling sentimental. And if she was clever, she stockpiled those berries as insurance, in case Mr. Homo Oeconomicus wandered off to penetrate other caves and the protein supply dried up. So yes, it’s definitely in our genes. But so is shame. And more often than not, shame is just the social surcharge for saying the quiet part out loud. You’re allowed to want money, security, even pleasure, as long as you throw in a ring, a house, and never call it a transaction.

Love Is Not A Savings Account

People aren’t really afraid of transactions, but rather of the déjà vu of disappointment. The fear isn’t in the exchange itself, but in the slippage: the moment when what begins as a clean agreement will collapse into the familiar pattern of one side defaulting while the other swallows the cost. Because investment breeds expectation, and once emotion enters the ledger, the accounting gets messy. Suddenly it’s not the fee you’re worried about, but that the balance sheet of your life is reading: underloved, underfucked, and overdrafted. Maybe that’s exactly the paradox: transactions only fail when the terms are unclear, yet most relationships begin with exactly that. With no terms at all, just a vague hope that love will cover the cost of labour. And the labour is immense: best friend, therapist, sparring partner, financial advisor, oral sex expert, flawless co-parent — all without ever submitting an invoice. 

Gridlock, so the Gottman Institute argues, is what happens when couples repeat the same fight without resolution, which is a stronger predictor of divorce than even infidelity. And when expectations aren’t voiced, they’re inevitably unmet. But unmet needs don’t dissolve, they fester. People drag different resources, traumas, and definitions of fairness to the table, rarely articulate them, and then act surprised when the contract implodes. And instead of saying, “I’ve provided financial security, I now expect you to get down on your knees,” it all gets buried under layers of quiet resentment. Because you’re not allowed to enforce the deal. That would be vulgar. That would be calculated. That would break the illusion. But without the clarity, there’s no fairness. And without fairness, there’s no satisfaction.

I, on the other hand, come with terms and conditions, and they always apply. Oddly enough, both parties end up far happier than in most so-called “real” relationships. Because once the transaction is acknowledged, something surprising happens: communication improves by 170% (I totally made this up, but it feels emotionally peer-reviewed.) Because when expectations are named, they can be negotiated. And when they’re negotiated, they can be fulfilled. The result is more emotional clarity, less mind-reading, and fewer passive-aggressive sighs across the dinner table. From a psychological perspective, this aligns with the Vulnerability-Stress-Adaptation Model of relationships, which suggests that couples thrive when they can actively adapt to each other’s evolving needs, and not when they assume the initial emotional contract will carry the relationship indefinitely. Adaptation, of course, requires communication. And communication requires naming the terms of emotional exchange, even when they’re uncomfortable. But when one partner resists renegotiation, the balance sheet of the relationship turns imbalanced, leaving one side in a big deficit. In finance, that’s called default. In love, we call it heartbreak.

Negotiation as Foreplay

And that’s the real taboo, isn’t it? Not the money, or the sex, but rather the audacity of walking into a relationship knowing exactly what you want and being bold enough to say it out loud. Ironically, it’s the much-judged transactional model that offers the clearest psychological lessons. In companionship, the terms are laid out: time, attention, intimacy, boundaries, even exit clauses. They’re spelled out, and because they’re spelled out, they can actually be met. If circumstances change, the terms are renegotiated, and not buried under years of silent sulking. That transparency also enforces accountability: if one side defaults, the breach is obvious. Compare that to marriage, where expectations can accrue like compound interest and disappointment grows into emotional debt that no one wants to face. Psychologists would argue this clarity reduces so called cognitive load, which is the mental drag of running constant audits: Am I giving enough? Did I trigger another deficit? Are we in the red on affection this week? Instead of relying on romantic mind-reading (a skill humans are consistently terrible at), the dynamic shifts toward collaborative problem-solving. And maybe that’s another taboo: that the much-maligned transactional model often produces healthier returns. Couples who borrow from its structure like naming terms, renegotiating when things shift, and holding each other accountable, may not only close the orgasm gap, but the emotional one too. After all, love may be priceless, but no one likes paying hidden fees.

So no, I’m not trying to convince you that a date with a companion is inherently better than dinner with your wife, your partner, or your situationship who still “doesn’t believe in labels”. However, I do find it curious that the relationship model most praised for its virtue (marriage) often comes with the vaguest terms, the poorest communication, and the highest early-exit fees. Meanwhile, the transactional one tends to involve better boundaries, cleaner expectations, and, frankly, more enthusiastic follow-through. If more couples drafted their love lives with the precision of an invoice, we might finally cut down on the world’s most expensive recurring subscription: couples therapy.