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A childfree woman is being defended online after she refused to split payment for a babysitter during a night out with her friends.
In a viral Reddit post shared to the r/TwoHotTakes subreddit, a woman has questioned whether she was in the wrong for “not chipping in” for her friends’ babysitter, despite having no children herself. In the post, which has received more than 7,000 upvotes since it was shared last week, the woman explained that she’s been friends with the same group of four women since high school and they each have one child.
“We do dinner about once a month and recently the group has hired a babysitter to watch the kids while we go to dinner. It’s four kids, so it’s $100 for two-three hours,” she wrote. “At dinner, we take turns paying. Everyone generally orders about the same amount of stuff, one alcoholic drink and we split two bottles of sparkling water for the table along with our entrees. It’s never really been a thing, until recently.”
She explained that they each take turns paying, and this time it was her turn to pay for the dinner – the first time since her friends had hired the group babysitter. “I paid for dinner as normal, and hugged everyone goodbye,” the woman said. But when she got home, she had received a “flurry of texts” from the group saying that she owed $100.
“They said because it was my week to pay, I was also expected to pay for the babysitter ‘because all of us get the pleasure of being out without kids,’” she recalled her friends saying. “I said, ‘I don’t have kids. Why would I pay for your babysitter?’ They said, ‘You get the pleasure of hanging out with us and it’s the only way we can do it kid free.’”
While the woman revealed that her friends think she’s unwilling to “pay [her] share” of the babysitting fee, she maintained: “What share? I have no kids to babysit!”
