New Rules Baffle Many Who Play the Dating Game : Half Feel Awkward About How to Act in Relationships, Especially When Bill Arrives

In what she intended as a perfunctory display of good manners, Karen Terry offered to split the dinner tab with her date one recent night. Not only did he accept, he carefully tallied the bill and reported that her part was $6 more than his.

“I was amazed and completely turned off,” said the 31-year-old Irvine medical equipment sales representative. After all, she sniffed, he was the one who asked her out, and he obviously made a good living.

“Until then, I’d enjoyed his company,” Terry said.

But when he called a few days later, she made up excuses as to why she couldn’t find time, and has avoided him ever since. “If he’s that cheap on the first date, imagine how bad he would be as a husband,” she said.

Joe Powell might sympathize with the guy. He never knows what to do at that awkward moment when the check arrives.

“Some women insist on helping, but you never know if you should take them up on it,” said Powell, 44, a real estate broker in Orange. “I’ve even had women initiate the date, and then not contribute a cent to it.”

Andrea Keefer, 18, a UCLA college student who lives with her parents in Irvine, has “no qualms about asking a man out.” Patricia Nattrass, 58, an escrow officer in Costa Mesa, never has and probably never will.

Joe Rubalcava, 25, a software engineer in Fullerton, believes that women only think they want a sensitive man. “Then when you open up to her, her perception of you changes and she dumps you,” he said.

Welcome to the befuddling world of dating in the 1990s. “Everyone is confused,” Rubalcava noted.

A Times Orange County Poll of 500 unmarried adults suggested that he’s right--although respondents also showed a willingness to adapt.

Forty-four percent of the people interviewed say they typically share the expenses of a date. Clinging to traditional roles, however, when asked if they pay for the date themselves, only 3% of women say they normally foot the bill, while 56% of men go home with lighter pockets.

Just over half agreed with the statement: “Most of the unmarried people I meet in Orange County feel awkward about how to act in relationships because of changing men’s and women’s roles.”

“There’s a lot of confusion about who’s Fred Astaire and who’s Ginger Rogers,” said Pat Allen, a Newport Beach therapist and author of the book, “Getting to I Do.”

Now that both sexes can lead in romantic pursuits, Allen said, “we don’t know when to chase and when not to chase.”

A popular tactic today, Allen said, is for a woman to slip her business card to a man who captures her interest--but still, that leaves her on the waiting side of the telephone receiver.

Who should pay? Easy, said Allen: “The person who initiated the date.”

Couples make a mistake when they start dividing everything down the middle. “It gets tediously equal and neutralizes the romantic energy,” she said.

Allen, who gives seminars to singles both in Orange County and in Los Angeles, senses that people here are more traditional. “Men still pay for dates and open doors in Orange County,” she said. “In L.A., it’s whoever grabs the check first and whoever gets to the door first.”

Dexter Padgitt, 43, a video show editor who lives in Seal Beach, said he is an old-fashioned sort. “I open the door for my girlfriend, buy her flowers, buy her dinner. Sometimes I think I’m smothering her. She told me she doesn’t want me to pay for everything anymore.”

“I consider it chivalrous for a man to pay,” said Anaheim resident Cheryl Zuvich, 38, a buyer for an oil company. “But if we’ve been out a few times, I offer to pay, or invite him over to my place for dinner. I still think it’s true that women want to be courted.”

Paul Whittemore, a Newport Beach psychologist who teaches a course in dating skills, encourages male clients to pick up the tab. “When you’re first dating, symbolic gestures are important,” he said. “Women still place a lot of importance on a man’s ability to be the provider.”

But Dan Tisone, 24, the manager of a purchasing department for an engineering firm in Orange, shrugs off the idea that men can make a favorable impression by pouncing on the tab. “I pay for some dates and occasionally open doors,” he said. “But I like it when a woman does the same for me. I want to be pampered too.”