Not going halves with friend on lunch

[Rachaelf37]

So I went for lunch with one of my close friends a few weeks ago. She chose a slightly more expensive main and after had a small pudding whilst I just had a hot drink. When it was time to leave she said shall we split the bill. I said shall we just pay for our own as I didn't have a pudding.
I got a slight discount with a card I had (gave us both a discount). I then worked out my share rounded it up slightly and paid mine. She paid hers but was complaining why can't we split it.
I already had explained I was pretty broke that month for various reasons.

She is now not talking to me, weeks later. Was I being unreasonable?

The op said discount for both?

She shows a lack of empathy and more than a little manipulation.

This is how you learn what a good friend is - she is no loss to you.

She sounds like the kind of person who never likes being told no about anything. To still be sulking about it is ridiculous. Let her.

Whatever the cost if people want to pay their own you support that choice - you don’t expect freebies

We are no longer friends! 😅
The example I gave was part of a growing habit of parsimony. In the end we had a major falling out. I abide by the rule "Never rip off your friends."

I'm baffled as to why you would think somebody who pays their bills is a skinflint - and somebody who expects other people to pay their bills is not! Would you happily stick another £10 or £20 on your water bill direct debit each month and ask the water company to assign it to your friend's bill, so that they can pay less for their bill? If not, you sound like a real skinflint to me!!!

Read my post again. For the OP to get a discount she had to get a discount off the total bill, not just her half or I am sure she would have done that. She was not doing her friend a favour, she was using a card she had to get even more money off her own bill. The amount she was quibbling over was £3.50. Let that sink in. She also only said she was broke when it came to paying the bill, not before which would have changed things. At the end of the pay she was pissed because her friend's main was SLIGHTLY more than hers and the friend got a small dessert to the grand old tune of £3.50 which she refused to pay.

She added hers up and paid it, didn't leave a tip and whatever was left was the friend's bill.

It's fine to split it if you're skint and you had already used a discount for you both.

Let her stew, this is her problem. She's probably skint herself but didn't want to compromise on her meal to reflect it. Hopefully she'll learn from it.

I'm almost certain the £7 is an overestimation.

Even then, split between two people is negligible.

I think YABU. Your friend is also BU for being offended.

Me and my friends always split the bill because we don't mind paying for one another sometimes and it's swings and roundabouts.

That is a really stupid comparison but I'll tell you what I would not do... I would not look at the menu to check if my friend's main was a few pence more than mine and clock it, then refuse to split the bill because I didn't have a small dessert.
In other words, I would not embarrass myself over £3.50.

It really isn't having a dig to point out that you don't spend money you don't have. And conversations do evolve. We're on page 8. Rarely do the answers just go yes or no and get to 8 pages. You're questioning what's it got to do with me and you're finding HTH snarky! Other people have suggested walks etc. Is it nothing to do with them either? Should they not contribute?
Yes if I was her friend I would have paid for her. When i go out with my friend sometimes i pay sometimes she does sometimes we split.
Friend ordered a slightly more expensive meal and had a small dessert and coffee. I'm taking this to be one of those joint deals where you get coffee and cake for a fixed price. It's usually about 2.50 ish more than a coffee. OP also had coffee. Then the bill was discounted and split.

It doesn't matter how small the difference was, you are never obliged to subsidise someone else's meal .

Not unreasonable at all.

You were not tight at all, you paid your way.

The friend who expected you to pay for her meal is the tight one here!

I think it’s a bit tacky to split things accord to what you ate unless it’s a big difference eg £15 vs £45.
I think it’s good etiquette to split the bill and just move on. Perhaps that’s the British spirit of just not dwelling on money, just seems a bit bad manners and cheap. If yours is £15 and hers is £20 just split it and be done with it! It comes back in swings and roundabouts

I am British, and I wouldn’t dream of even asking someone to split the bill if I had bean tucking into extra courses! Especially not if they were struggling financially! I can’t get over some of these posts.

If £7 is the end of a friendship, don't go to lunch.

If you can't afford to pay for your own food, don't go to lunch.

Yep you can ask a friend not to split the bill. Weird of her to fall out with you over that even if she did think it was a bit petty.

Honestly, any decent friend, even if surprised, would understand. I don’t think you need to worry about being unreasonable. I really feel for you, these sorts of conversation can be so uncomfortable. X

As for people saying about warning somebody that you can't split the bill and can/will only pay for your own... I would be hugely offended by this, as it clearly insinuates that I am expecting them to sub me, rather than - of course - being fully prepared to pay my own bill. It's basically a way of calling you out in advance for being a CF, and telling you bluntly that your CF tricks will not work, even though you had not the faintest notion or intention of ever being a CF in any way whatsoever in the first place.

We're not talking about toddlers here, who see the ice cream van in the park and demand one, even though they have no money of their own; this is about adults apparently having to be warned that, if you order items from a restaurant, that means you have to pay for them!!

I bet that loads of people would have kept quiet about the discount and told the others to give them half/their 'share' of the full bill and then go to the till to settle up, using the discount.

I'm sure if OP had a crystal ball she wouldn't have. How was she to know how her cheeky friend was going to react?

I realise it was hyperbolic, but the suggestion that somebody is being tight because they can't/don't want to pay extra for an unrelated adult to get a discount off their bill is just bonkers.

It's nice that you aren't in the position to have to stick carefully to a budget (which can indeed include an occasional treat), but not everybody is that privileged.

How do you arrive at the idea that OP is checking up on how much her friend's order costs? Surely she was carefully choosing how to spend her own money on a limited budget - very standard for most people in shops/restaurants etc. - and was then asked to pay more than that, which made it instantly obvious that her friend had spent more on her own order.

If £7 signifies the end of a friendship, it probably wasn’t worth having in the first place.

Oh come on now. You think OP didn’t want to get her friend the discount as well - where has that come from ?
And yes it’s £3.50 plus a more expensive main so let’s say £5 in total. I agree it’s not a lot of money, but OP had already said she was short that month and ordered less than her friend. Friend should have automatically offered to pay the extra that her pudding cost, not refuse to and get in a strop about it.