Relearning Money, Relationships, Breathing

Hello, and welcome to the post I've been trying not to write. Once you've found your seat, you'll notice that a few courtesy items have been placed there for you. Please take a moment to become familiar with them: 1) airline quality barf bag for the sheer stupidity and angsty-ness of our topic today, 2) radiation-proof apron to shield your vital organs from rampant cliches, and 3) a nice, expensive bottle of water because we're going to be here for a while.

This post is about money, about couples and money.

Let's take the TV sitcom director's approach here, fast forwarding through a montage of illustrative shots, chronologically arranged, to explain my personal progression from miserly child hoarding allowances and giving loans with interest to her own mother, to panicked sub-par teenage waitress making bank deposits with envelopes stuffed with ones, to bitter, bitter college grad languishing in the pink collar ghetto and too petrified of penury (consonance!) to quit a job she hates, all the way to fairly-OK-with-life 20-something who's finally figured out how to balance a checkbook and who (naively ignorant of how credit works) pays down her Visa to zero each month.

Got all that? That's pretty much how it went. Money was only money when it was in your hands or in an account earning interest, and boy did it feel good in your hands. One should never let money get too far from the hands, because then... oh, then...

Here's what I learned in the first 26 years of life about when money was in your hands: you win all arguments; you are independent and can come and go as you like; no one else may guilt you or force you to do anything you don't want to do; you don't have to hide the purchases you make; being on the highest rung (earning the most) means you may delegate all the shitty jobs to someone lower.

(Mom, Dad-- just to be clear, I'm also talking about college roommate situations and previous relationships.)

If we were looking for a T-shirt slogan to sum up my views about money and relationships, we'd be pretty safe with, "Money! The only way to Independence!" Note, if you will, the inherent contradiction between two major driving forces in my life-- the desire to have meaningful relationships, and the desire to be totally and completely independent. (Now might be a good time for the radiation shields)

For years, this worked. I never lived with a boyfriend, mostly out of the fear of getting screwed on the bills when we broke up (note the when, not the if), and most of my roommate relationships eventually sailed into treacherous waters over questions of finance (although I do want to state here, for the record, that with one notable exception, all of my college roommates were notoriously and catastrophically flaky about money, so it wasn't just my pathology at work here). Anyway, back to how it worked. I had a job I liked, a savings account, a retirement account, a credit card that didn't haunt me at night, and a budget whose only extravagance was rent for an apartment without a roommate.

And then Pants came along. And I had to subtract from the equation the certainty of an eventual break-up and the financial prophylactic measures I'd taken with previous boyfriends (the first rule is that we don't talk about money, we split things; the second rule is that we don't talk about money). And then the military got involved and everything sped up-- we'll get married and move together and I'll quit my job! (In fact, I'll quit my job every time we move, every eight months!) And we'll combine all our finances, with equal access and equal ownership for all, and we'll be partners in everything, everything 50/50, no matter what, no matter who earns more. We'll be the perfect loving communist state, just you and I!

Given 26 years of preconditioning, of me continually being the little girl with the Bandaid box stuffed full of bills this ideal of blissful equality was hard to master.

First of all, someone must farm the money, by which I mean organize it into neat rows, make sure it gets watered with measured contributions, and reallocated to make the best of changing conditions. What a nice little metaphor. I was a pretty good money farmer, albeit unsophisticated. Pants was far better, and it seemed to bring him much joy. I grimly watered with mechanical regularity but otherwise ignored my accounts; Pants was into organic fertilizer and root grafts. So I did what I thought was best and most helpful: I let him be the farmer.

Initially, I think this puzzled him, the fact that I appeared uninterested in all things money anymore. That wasn't it; I just lost faith that what I did was much help. Combine this with the difficulty of finding steady and gainful employment when you move every eight months, and pretty soon you get a two-fer, a nice combo meal of insecurity: what I do isn't that helpful AND what I earn can't ever be counted on as a steady income.

If we reference my 26-year conditioning, (barf bags ready, please), we now see that I view myself as the loser of arguments; dependent; perpetually guilty (about what? I don't know, so I'll constantly make something up!); a hider of purchases (oh, Starbucks, you saucy, tempting bitch-- I'll put it on the credit card); and the grumbling penetant, always trying to make up for my money-sucking self by scowling my way through household chores.

[I'm taking a breather here to walk around the house and deal with the fact that I feel like I'm about to post an unflattering Polaroid of my dimpled ass to the Internet.]

Ah, better.

Pants tried. He tried explaining the various interest rates on investments and accounts, the multiple, fluctuating military paychecks, the many scheduled automatic deductions for bills (see? so much more convenient!) He also continued to ask my permission before making purchases, a process so painful and confusing to me because my thinking was, it's your money, why ask? My answer was always a fatalistic laugh and then, "Yes?" I felt incapable of understanding the budget completely, and further, I had no faith that my involvement in any of this wouldn't result in sudden and massive failure. It seemed fully plausible that with the touch of button, our entire carefully orchestrated financial life would disappear-- zip! And it would be my fault.

We've managed to operate this way-- Pants the diligent farmer, always muttering and fretting over the state of the crops, and me the Monty Python-esque peasant, glopping around in shit and ignorance and hoping blindly that I don't bankrupt us each time I use the debit card-- for some time.

That all came to head recently. There's no need to go into all of it, but I think all the history I've explained above sets up a fairly logical explanation of a) how things were, and b) how they could never hope to continue on this way if we were to stay married. Obviously, I've left out any speculation on Pants' financial philosophy and history, and that is as it should be. It is largely healthy, with maybe a touch of extra anxiety, which, given his utter lack of partner involvement for the past three years, seems entirely logical.

The upshot of a week's worth of gut-wrenching discussions, is that there is now a financial command center in our study! A big white board with our budget all laid out and the bill amounts for the current month, along with an up or down arrow to indicate deviation from the previous month (my idea! I do have things to contribute!), and a running tally of the available balance along with anticipated, non-recurring costs (car repairs, etc.). We've also undertaken a series of commitments meant to bring greater clarity and substance to our communications about money.

And now, for the final barf bag/radiation shield declaration: I know what the balance is in all our accounts! I know why it is this particular number, and how it might reasonably be expected to change in the coming months! I don't want to vomit and run away when we discuss whether or not we can afford something, and my answer to that question no longer has a question mark on the end of it.

We're in Day 4 of the New Order with no problems so far. This may seem short, but believe me, four days with clarity, four days without the vague panic of anything money-related, is big. And this is not to say that we're totally in the black and lighting the grill with twenties-- things are tight. 80's jeans tight. But at least now I know what that means.