My date wants me to sign an NDA. Should I?
It may be innocuous. It may be embarrassing. It may be more shady or sinister.
Today’s guest column is by Ariella Steinhorn, a New York City-based writer whose work focuses on relationship dynamics and the spectrum of power to love. She founded Superposition and Lioness, companies that work with whistleblowers to bring forward stories about power, and Nonlinear Love, an initiative that tells unconventional love stories without judgment or prescription.
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The other day, a new friend and I were talking about the roller coaster ride that is dating in New York City. She told me about a service where high-net-worth men pay a significant monthly fee in exchange for dates with a highly curated group of women, put together by matchmakers. The women do not pay to access the men, and you don’t actually know who you are going out with beforehand (the pairing is left to the discretion of the matchmaker, based on your photos and answers to an extensive questionnaire). For each date, women are picked up by a car service and delivered to a destination of the mystery man’s choosing.
As a piece of this, she told me, some of the men ask that their romantic prospects, the women, sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) ahead of first dates.
My first reaction to this was a visceral one, a declaration that I would never be interested in such a matchmaking service. I had never been asked to sign an NDA in a dating capacity, not even by the A-list Hollywood actor who I went out with, or the billionaire sports team owner who I dated. Maybe they did not believe that they were men worthy of needing an agreement to cover up strange or shady behavior. I think that most people actually want to believe that their closed door behaviors are decent.
In any case, the idea of signing a legally binding contract before a date made my stomach twist, like he was trying to wrest power from me already in a power dynamic usually skewed in the man’s advantage. Maybe there always comes a time in relationships when elements become transactional — who is paying for what. But to start a romance off with a defensive and protective tone felt like it was counter to the idea of falling in love in the first place.
A few weeks later, a journalist at New York Magazine reached out to me for an interview about the prevalence of NDAs in our personal life. His interest in this stemmed from hearing that a friend had gone out with a divorced woman who seemed hesitant to share any personal information about her life. She later revealed that she had signed a non-disclosure agreement with her wealthy ex-husband, and was afraid that if she shared any details about her past marriage, she would be breaking it.
All of this NDA-talk made me wonder (oh hey SATC): when did dating prospects start leading with DocuSign instead of flowers?
Historically, in patriarchal societies where women needed men (usually to protect them from other men involved in war or resource grabs), giving women money in exchange for protection of their bodies and their children’s bodies was common. Marriage was an economic proposition of protection. Powerful men would give money to women outside of their marriages, too — and so long as women exchanged sexual power for protection, it would be unwise for her to speak out against him and be ostracized socially, politically, and financially.
As women joined the workforce and gained economic power, though, the need to attach to a man and keep silent about anything problematic going on in their relationship or family units became less and less necessary. They could leave him. But then a new realization set in: some of the dynamics in intimate romantic relationships were cropping up in their workplaces, too. Instead of a man’s rules to abide by, it was now their employer’s.
Corporate NDAs proliferated primarily to protect the proprietary information of companies from being stolen by competitors. Secret recipes, complex algorithms, the musical notes comprising songs — all of these things were worthy of legal protection. And then, with the explosion of the #MeToo movement, it became clear that NDAs had become very broad in scope. Beyond trade secrets, they were being used to sweep the darker sides of human behavior under the rug. Some people of course view silence in exchange for survival as a reasonable trade-off — or even healthy, from a mental health perspective, to not wallow in a bad memory. And sometimes it is, as not everything is a Harvey Weinstein case to be blown open. But for others, it eats away at them.
Overall, I don’t think it is as common for NDAs to be used in dating contexts compared to workplace contexts — unless you are dating in ultra-wealthy or famous circles. To that point, I asked a friend of mine if she would sign an NDA in order to have the experience of dating someone in that world. She said that if the prospective date was vetted by a matchmaking service and not (hopefully) dangerous, she would sign an NDA anyway to get in the room with the person, at least so she could investigate what it was they might want to hide and at the very least get a better understanding of the way that the world works through his proximity to power. The NDA might be a non-issue, ultimately. And if there were a big problem, she questioned whether he would actually sue her for breaking an NDA to call him out — because then his lawsuit would become a public record, drawing more scrutiny to whatever went on in the first place.
I suppose, it is up to each woman’s comfort level, how much of an anthropological experiment she wants it to be.
I understand the need to protect privacy in a personal relationship where two people are sharing extremely intimate moments with another. Things can get ripped out of context, embellished, or made up — on all sides. People should probably not be in the habit of extorting each other. And even if it’s not that, there are a lot of gray areas and subjectivity to relationship experience that make people nervous if things end badly or just end. But will shoving paperwork at someone actually work in keeping the relationship private? As the saying goes (and as we are seeing play out with Donald Trump and Stormy Daniels today), the cover-up is usually what first gets them in trouble, rather than the crime.
There are endless reasons that a billionaire or a man on an elite matchmaking service might want someone to sign an NDA. It may be innocuous. It may be embarrassing. It may be more shady or sinister. It is clear that his reputation matters to him. However, this reputation and his money, which warrants freedom and status, may ultimately be more important to him than love.
Most of us do not have that much to lose on paper, though. Maybe, for women in particular, we have heard so many words and stories hurled at us that it might not matter as much what is said about us publicly or privately. We still can and want to experience the expanse of the world and romantic love in it if we want to — signed NDA or not — without fear of overwhelming shame or a fall from power. That, to me, is the ultimate freedom.
What do you think–would you sign an NDA before a date or with an ex? Let’s talk about it on Diem
ICYMI
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