In my first year at university, my new best friend and I fell in with a group of visiting American students. Provincial British children of the 80s, we found Americans innately glamorous; though the music of my hometown Manchester was cool, there were still no young adult (YA) British films or books, fashion was Seattle grunge and they had snacks unknown to Europe.
These junior year abroad students were a year older than us and a decade more confident. They were certain of the correct clothes and manners. They were experts with hair and make-up, and had experience of American boys who asked girls out on dates instead of – at best – drunkenly telling their friend not to tell your friend they fancied you and then changing their minds by the cold light of day.
These girls also had money, because that kind of university in the United States required parents with serious capital while the British equivalent was still, then, just about, free. We all rightly scorned the long-boiled institutional “food” in the college dining hall, but my friend K and I mostly cooked for ourselves, mostly in the sub-Mediterranean traditions of our mildly bohemian parents.
There was a lot of pasta and tinned tomatoes.
The visiting students, while loudly despising British food, liked to go out to dinner in restaurants, and often they invited us to join them.
Flattered to be included, K and I brushed our hair and went along, sat in the corner listening respectfully to their damning assessments of British weather, plumbing, manners and life in general. We ordered carefully, a vegetable side-dish and tap water, because we couldn’t really afford to be there at all, while our new friends commanded three courses and bottles of wine they were too young to buy in Boston.
And then the bill came, and invariably the visitors told the waiter to split it around the table. K and I exchanged despairing glances, foreseeing hard times ahead, but for several weeks we obediently coughed up because it would have been stingy and horribly awkward to do anything else. After a month – I fear maybe more – in which our subsidy of our friends’ lavish habits left us living on stale bread and peanut butter between times, we saw sense and stopped going out with them.
For some years after that, my friends and I usually divided bills with approximate reference to who’d ordered what. That was the natural arrangement there and then, and we didn’t think about or discuss it, but in retrospect we were allowing each other to make individual decisions about the balance of appetite, enjoyment and economy.
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After that, life choices and events made some of us much richer than others, and occasionally someone who’d progressed into corporate life would offer to treat those committed to art and scholarship. It was never taken for granted, and the offer could be declined or accepted without offence.
Later yet, we began to split the bill without reference to who had what, because the teetotal vegetarians (me) were making a lifestyle choice more than a financial one, and we chose restaurants or less expensive outings to accommodate everyone’s means.
Among my British and European friends, that’s mostly where we are now: approximate turn-taking for coffee and cake, divide the bill for a meal by the number of people at the table.
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I hadn’t understood the cultural specificity of this norm until I moved to Ireland. For the first time, I saw people dive for the bill, sometimes elbowing or even shoving equally determined friends, and more than once adults throwing cash at each other when the intended recipient refused to take it into her hands. I learned, belatedly, the art of quietly picking up the tab on the way to the bathroom. I recall with pointless, hot-faced shame the times I tried to split a bill in the early months, understanding now that I gave offence by both wanting to pay and expecting to pay only my share. I didn’t know, I hadn’t understood and it was no one’s job to tell me that that’s not how people do things here.
The Irish arrangement affirms bonds through generosity and obligation.
The north European custom respects autonomy and an egalitarianism that may or may not reflect the realities around the table.
If you can afford it, they’re both fine ways to share a meal, it’s just useful to know which assumptions apply.