Man Who Grew Up Poor Describes The Odd Reality Of Dating A Rich Girl
Her family is not living within the norms, and he was shocked when he realized it.
Tony Saiko via Unsplash / benscripps, Bianca Marie Arreola and MRay Photography via Canva A man who grew up poor frequently posts about the culture shock he feels dating his girlfriend, who grew up rich. In a recent TikTok, he recounted a time when her family took both of them out for dinner. Her parents were under the assumption that he was just her friend (seeing as she introduced him as her "friend"), but the way they treated him let him know that they were very well off.
It was obvious at the beginning of their relationship that their lives were completely different.
“They took us out to dinner, and the first thing she asked was like, what do you wanna eat?” he explained at the start of his TikTok. “Now, me being the hospitable young poor kid that I grew up as I was like, ‘I'll get whatever you guys get.’” But when they said "what do you wanna eat?" — they meant we'll get you anything you want to eat!
It’s unclear whether or not this comes from being poor, but it’s understandable why someone who always had to worry about money wouldn’t want to be a financial burden on someone else. They’re not going to order above and beyond just because someone else offers to pay. They might even get something cheaper than they would normally get just to minimize the damage, but this could simply be a matter of courtesy instead of socioeconomic upbringing — this wasn’t the most shocking part though.
“What behooved me the most was the fact that her mother then went to five different restaurants for all four of the kids,” he explains. “We went to go get pizza, we went to Chick-fil-A. Where else do we go? We went to a great American steakhouse, and I'm just in the back like, ‘look, I'm just getting whatever you guys give me.’”
He said he was lucky enough to even be asked the question. As a kid, his mother had always told him “You gonna get what I get and like it,” but this family was willing to go above and beyond to get all of their kids whatever they wanted at any given point. This was a shock to him and something that could be considered a privilege. These kids were never told that what they wanted wasn’t within their means, and that was shocking to him — but that wasn’t even the “icing on the cake,” as he says.
When he finished his food, he was met by a maid who cleaned up after him.
“Once we all finished our food and was about to throw it all away, some random lady walked up and grabbed my stuff,” he explained. “I was like, Sam, who is this? [Is] your aunt taking my food? It was some lady named Lala. They had a maid.”
Having a maid in the United States is not common at all — a maid is different than just hiring a cleaner to clean your house. According to the U.S. Census, between 2017 and 2021 there are over 124 million occupied households registered in the U.S. Zippia estimates that there are currently over 53,586 maids currently employed in the United States — if one maid is employed in one household, that’s a rate of 0.043%. In comparison, OneDesk claims that nearly 10% of all U.S. households paid a professional service to clean their homes in 2022.
Even considering a margin of error like, maybe each maid is hired in three different households, that number would still be 1/100th of the number of homes that hire professional cleaners, which is already a low number.
Sam, the man’s girlfriend, claims that she wasn’t actually their maid, but he asks her an important question. “Okay. Did you guys pay her to clean and cook?” he asks, when she replies “Yes,” he jokingly yells “Then she was a maid!”
For someone who grew up poor, it’s a shocking reality that some people are wealthy enough to pay someone else to cook and clean their house. In a poorer household, everyone is chipping in to do the cooking and the cleaning, and sometimes even those chores are being impacted by how poor they are.
For this couple, growing up wealthy versus poor doesn't seem to have impacted the love they have for each other, and that's what's important. But that doesn't mean we don't want to see the video of dinner at his childhood home when Sam has to actually clean her own plate in the sink.
Isaac Serna-Diez is an Assistant Editor who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics. Keep up with his rants about current events on his Twitter.