Love & Passion Quote by David Wain

Wain’s joke weaponizes a moral stance to expose how quickly “principle” turns into self-serving accounting. The first sentence poses as virtue: a clean, almost earnest objection to transactional intimacy. The second line yanks the mask off. Dinner becomes the “payment,” and the woman becomes the vendor. The laugh comes from the whiplash: he’s not rejecting commodification so much as insisting it already governs dating, then pretending to be offended by it.

The intent is less about sex work than about the petty logic of entitlement that shadows heterosexual courtship. He’s parodying the guy who treats paying for a meal as an investment with expected returns: attention, affection, access. The subtext is a critique of how “chivalry” can be a socially acceptable wrapper for purchase, and how easily resentment blooms when the implied contract isn’t honored. By framing a dinner as payment for sex, the speaker indicts himself; the punchline positions him as both moralist and customer, revealing the hypocrisy.

Context matters: Wain’s comedic persona (alt-comedy, deadpan skewering of male ego) thrives on taking a familiar cultural script and pushing it to its ugliest literal conclusion. The line lands because it mirrors a real conversational undercurrent in dating discourse - who pays, what it signals, what’s “owed” - and then makes the implicit explicit, forcing the audience to recognize the transactional thinking they’re usually allowed to keep deniable.