Reply To: Ladies First – Is it respectful or not?

Joseph, I apologize, I only read your last post carefully after I wrote my above post, so I didn’t really answer it.

The answer is that I don’t know. I was only thinking about dating situations. If I were not on a date, I think that I would expect the guy to go first for tznius. Honestly, even on dates, I always wait half a second to see if he will go first, and only if I see that he is expecting me to go first do I go first (since, when it comes to things that aren’t halacha and don’t make me personally uncomfortable, my personal shita has always been that it’s both more polite and more tznius to NOT make an issue out of things – that’s just always been my personal shita, developed by myself. On the other hand, in a situation in which I am personally uncomfortable, I do try to stick to my standards.)

The guys nearly always expect me to go first, so I do. I noticed though that on the one or two occasions when the guy actually did go first, I did feel somewhat slighted. I think this was because I had gotten used to the other way.

I’m not 100% sure why it wouldn’t bother me in a non-dating situation even though it does in a dating situation. It might be because I never got used to it in a non-dating situation, because maybe most men I know do go first (as opposed to most guys I go out with who expect me to go first). Or it may be because one of the first guys I ever went out with told me that according to halacha, you are supposed to let the girl go first on a date, and that stuck in my head.

Honestly, I can’t remember the last time I was in such a situation either on a date or not, so I can’t be sure of how I would feel.