I was the person who paid because everyone else had discovered they did not have to.

A privilege nobody is asked to justify becomes, over enough repetitions, a right in everyone’s mind but the one who is paying for it, and the paying one learns to call the arrangement love because the alternative is to admit what it actually is.

Chapter 3 — The Walking Credit Card

The part that should have warned me earliest was that they had a name for it, and the name was a joke, and the joke was told to my face.

Whenever someone chose an expensive restaurant, which was increasingly often, my sister-in-law would say it before we had even been seated, laughing, waving a manicured hand toward me as though presenting a prize on a game show.