F*ck Love: One Shrink's Sensible Advice for Finding a Lasting Relationship
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Don’t apologize for knowing how much money you need and assessing how well a prospective partnership can contribute to your efforts. Being a good financial planner is not the same as being a gold digger; in examining a person’s resources, you are not being greedy or ignoring the way you feel about her personality. Instead, you are assessing how she implements professed values and makes the difficult management decisions that a partnership obliges you to make together.
Money may be a destructive force, especially in romance, but not having it does a lot more damage than having just enough. Instead of limiting your search to those with offshore accounts or writing off wealth altogether as unimportant, stick to the middle ground and look for someone who’s just plain accountable.
The Good Things You Want Wealth to Deliver
• An end to worry, fear, envy, disrespect, impatience, and the deep sense of dread caused by the words “college loans” and “credit score.”
• Awesome dates who are so blinded by your big spending that they can see past your oily appearance, dull conversation, and nonexistent manners and straight into your heart (and bank accounts).
• An end to any possible arguments about child care, dirty dishes, or dirty children thanks to your well-financed fleet of nannies, cleaning ladies, nannies to take care of the cleaning ladies, etc.
• An end to hard choices when you care about three people in need but can afford to help no more than one, so you need never fail to appease anyone who would otherwise make you feel guilty, such as the two people who dropped dead because you couldn’t afford to be there.
• The best doctors, personal trainers, private chefs, shrinks, and colonic artists so that you can feel healthy while never being denied anything (except dignity, if you’re going with the colonics).
Profile of the Provider
Here is a list of traits associated with someone of means:
• Physical attributes: The toned muscles, white teeth, and smooth skin of someone who invests a lot of time and effort in her looks, but the mussy hair and low-key-yet-expensive wardrobe of someone whose wealth is at a visual frequency that’s only perceptible to other rich people.
• Common occupations: If not slaving away in a competitive field to achieve means (e.g., law, business, plastic surgery for internal organs), then she may have been born into wealth (or retired after a long career, or just selling an app that makes meow sounds) and working in philanthropy and sitting on various boards, be they of museums and hospitals or the foundation to fight bird cholera.
• What attracts you first: Her willingness to spoil you, let you cut the line with her, and generally give you entrée into the world of the 1 percent without your having to worry about the bill (so triggering you to yearn forever for a lasting relationship that comes with a permanent membership in the VIP club of life).
• Red flags: An inability to say no and distinguish personal survival priorities, such as having rent money and avoiding debt, from less important needs, such as having hair-product money and never sleeping on sheets with less than a four-digit thread count; a yen for partying, drinking, and generally burning money, time, and brain cells; friendships based on status, fabulousness, or access to cocaine, rather than mutual support and shared responsibilities and values.
Seeking Wealth
Dating a rich person seems like a great idea, particularly when you’re bored, broke, and lonely and a new rich boyfriend would literally solve all your problems. Eventually, however, you realize that wealth also shapes the culture, expectations, and interactions of the people who do and don’t have it, and having a money-messiah partner creates a whole new set of problems you never thought about and couldn’t previously afford. Dating someone rich, or at least significantly richer than you, is almost like dating someone from another country, which means dealing with a different language and set of customs and manners. While that makes for wacky misunderstandings on sitcoms, it is a lot less fun in real life when the unavoidable class gap leads to confusion and hurt. That doesn’t mean you should hate or avoid dating people who have more or less money than you, but you shouldn’t expect a richer partner to improve your life, or for you to be the answer for someone with fewer funds. Being with someone whose wealth makes him or her hard to relate to can make you feel far more uncomfortable and lonely than being bored and broke ever did.
Here are three examples:
• I don’t resent my boyfriend’s money, but he always gives me presents knowing that I can’t reciprocate his generosity, and that makes me uncomfortable. When I try to refuse his presents or gently chide him for being too thoughtful, he gets defensive, hurt, and upset. We work together so well in every other way, I’d hate to see this one issue ruin our relationship. My goal is to find a way to have a comfortable, equal relationship with someone who is much richer than I am.
• Things have always been so easy for my girlfriend—she comes from money and has a trust fund, so she doesn’t understand how to save or do without. I like her sophistication and the way she’s comfortable wherever she goes, but she seems oblivious about money, so she sometimes says and does inappropriate things without having a clue she’s offended anybody who’s not also loaded. My goal is not to be prejudiced against her just because she is so privileged.
• I was always good at school and am the first person in my blue-collar, high-school-dropout family to go to college. Now, however, when among my peers who share my level of education and subsequent social class, I feel as if I don’t belong. When I date college-educated women, they don’t have a clue about where I come from and can be condescending and ignorant about it. My goal is to find someone who can accept my brain and my background.
The ideal relationship dynamic is for partners’ strengths and weaknesses to complement each other—in an area where one person struggles, the other excels, making them a dynamic duo of domesticity. The one area where this isn’t always true, however, is money, because if one partner lacks wealth while the other is swimming in it, the contrast is not one of personal strengths, but of circumstances. A difference in wealth can interfere with a budding relationship by creating differences in expectations and assumed responsibilities.
For instance, receiving gifts that are far more costly than anything you can afford or reciprocate is like receiving any bad gift; what makes an expensive gift worse than just a bad one, such as a handmade iPhone sweater or anything with an “As Seen on TV!” label, is that it doesn’t just make you feel bad about your relationship, it makes you feel guilty, broke, and bad about yourself. When the boyfriend who is trying to make you feel special discovers his overly rich gift has done the opposite and made you miserable, he may well feel hurt, creating conflict and making you both feel that you don’t know each other at all.
You may wish he had the skill to find a perfect gift that makes you happy and costs almost nothing, but he’s unlikely to be able to pull this off unless he has the smarts and wealth to pay for advice from a professional shopper. Besides, when you find out that he spent money to hire someone to figure out what you’d like, you’ll be even more upset. So you’re wiser to accept the unhappy way you feel about his wealth and instead review the overall quality of give-and-take in your relationship.
Don’t be distracted by his generous gift because, if being generous with money is easy for him, it’s no indicator of whether he’ll be generous with things that count, such as with his time and effort, particularly when the job is unromantic. Instead, add up the giving qualities that matter most in the long run, such as whether he’s a hard worker, a good and trustworthy friend, and willing to save as much as he spends and invest in the same things you do.
Just because your conscience requires financial parity in gift giving doesn’t mean that your own contributions, in thoughtfulness and investment, aren’t equal to his. If you were judging the situation as a friend would—as opposed to judging it through the lens of your own financial shame and insecurity—you would value his giving accor
ding to the effort, sacrifice, and hard work he contributes and not by the money he spends and would judge yourself according to what you know and believe without the reflex guilt of an overactive conscience.
Once you’re square with your own giving, you’re free to accept valuable gifts without feeling obliged to give an equivalent amount in dollars and without overvaluing a person’s generosity because of his financial contributions. With luck, you can have your cake and eat it by finding a rich guy who can also be a good partner (even if his gift-giving skills are lacking).
Dating someone who has grown up so wealthy that she never thinks about money can be fun, particularly if you enjoy her character, sense of style and confidence, can tolerate her ignorance about the way other people live, and aren’t generally choking on resentment and jealousy. You have to wonder, however, if her inexperience with saving and her obliviousness of the impact of careless statements about money on others will change once your relationship allows you to give her constructive advice—or just straightforward observations—she may not have received before.
Ask her to consider how she would make tough resource decisions if necessary, and see if she can be more thoughtful about the financial worries and concerns of others (being careful not to make her defensive about her own wealth and circumstances). Watch to see if she can assess her resources in terms of the cost of kids, their education, and her long-term security. Ask yourself if she could stop spending if she needed to or just for the sake of finding other techniques for sustaining her sense of well-being. Look for her willingness to have relationships with people who are less wealthy and to invest in the effort required.
She may overvalue the confidence that comes from disregarding money, especially if, as it does for so many, her wealth has become a comforting addiction. In that case, she may not be able to change this unfortunate character flaw so easily. Hopefully, she will be interested in freeing herself from the feel-good shortcuts of wealth and your relationship will be a positive step in that direction. If she isn’t interested in considering how the less fabulous live, it’s time to move on before your life together becomes unfabulous, indeed.
A special discomfort arises from hanging out with rich or even middle-class people if you’ve grown up blue-collar and poor. Even when you’ve thoroughly deserved scholarships and promotions and are well liked by the wealthy people in your new world, your hard-earned success may leave you feeling guilty, isolated, and disloyal to those you’ve left behind. Dating someone from your new world may deepen your feeling of being a stranger in a strange social class or, worse, of becoming the worst thing anyone from the old neighborhood can be: somebody who thinks he’s better than everybody else.
It’s natural to want to find someone in your new world who accepts you the way you are, or at least understands what you’re going through, but that may be impossible. Even if someone who has never worried about money could fully understand your experience, she might well have trouble overcoming your nonacceptance of yourself.
So when you meet an educated woman who is interested in you and your background, don’t let guilt oblige you to depend on her understanding. Instead, tell her proudly where you come from, allow her to connect the dots, and don’t accept anyone who isn’t impressed with what you’ve accomplished. You’ll have a good chance of finding a partner if you look for the same qualities in her character that helped you to work hard and travel as far as you’ve come.
Don’t judge yourself by the friendships that dissolve because of envy or your inability to bridge a growing gap between your past and future, or blame yourself because former friends reject you for seeming stuck-up or uncaring. Judge yourself by your effort and good heart, respect yourself for trying, and learn to bear the loneliness that can arise from your kind of success, where you feel that you can never go home again or feel totally at home in your new world.
Dating someone whose relationship and experience with money is different from yours generates doubts and problems that can’t easily be erased. Stay focused on what a prospective partner does with money, rather than with how much she has, and you’ll learn whether she has the basic qualities you’re looking for. If she does, your money differences need not tip the balance between you, and the ideal relationship dynamic may still be in reach.
Quiz: Cash Questionnaire—Is Your Date Too Financially Focused?
1. Your first date, at a moderately priced restaurant of your choosing, seems to have gone well—lots of lighthearted chitchat and laughs—but when the check arrives, your potential boyfriend does the following:
A: He pulls out his strange credit card, which he explains is so exclusive to big spenders that it’s made of pure gold, and insists that you two have your next date at one of the restaurants he’s invested in (after going there in his private plane).
B: He dumps three different cards out of his wallet and indicates his willingness to pay his share as soon as he figures out which one isn’t maxed out.
C: Offers to pay, but is happy to accept your offer to pay half if that would make you more comfortable, all while suggesting how much he looks forward to doing this again and getting to treat you next time.
2. On your third date with a girl you like, she’s running late, so she asks you to meet her at her place before you go out to a movie, giving you a chance to look around her apartment. You notice:
A: That her giant place in a superfancy neighborhood is filled with top-of-the-line appliances, artwork you swear you’ve seen in museums, and a coffee table covered with high-end-fashion and interior-design magazines that contain profiles of the apartment.
B: That the location isn’t safe, there’s so much garbage in the living room that it may count as a fourth roommate, and that the pile of unpaid bills in the bathroom may count as the fifth.
C: That it’s neither a showplace nor a hovel, but an affordable, clean, homey apartment in a neighborhood she’s not likely to get murdered in.
3. While getting to know a few facts about your new boyfriend, the topic of his exes comes up, and they all seem to share the same financial profile. Turns out he mostly dates girls who:
A: Had eight homes, parents who donated buildings to the college they most wanted to go to, and sweet-sixteen/coming-out parties that cost more than the GDP of most African countries; all facts that your new boyfriend seems a little too proud of.
B: Work at nonprofits or in social work, care a lot about recycling and rescuing cats that are missing at least one leg or eye, and were always there for him with a warm bed and a homemade organic meal when he was unemployed and broke (which was pretty much all the time).
C: Were employed, independent, and savvy enough at budgeting to afford vacations, although you’d rather not see any of the pictures of him in Belize with his old girlfriend in a bikini, even if there’s also a monkey in the shot.
4. When the Powerball prize approaches a billion dollars, you and your new girlfriend decide to buy a ticket for fun. When you ask her what she would do with the grand prize, she says:
A: She would finally get that bigger yacht she’s had her eye on, maybe buy her favorite shoe company so she’d have first dibs on the fall line, and see if she could buy some human organs on the black market just for fun.
B: She’d “invest” most of it in buying more lottery tickets, but also give some to her brother once he gets out of jail so he can go to rehab (eighth time’s the charm!) and maybe finally get into selling cosmetics door-to-door.
C: She’d get the lump sum, pay off all her debts, buy a nice place to live that has good resale potential, and take her family to dinner at her father’s favorite “special occasion” steak place before putting the rest into a rainy-day fund.
5. When you and your boyfriend decide to move in together, he agrees to move into your place since you own while he rents. When it comes to choosing between your furniture and his, his is fancier (which isn’t surprising, considering his salary is much higher than yours), while yours is a mix of s
tuff inherited, bought at IKEA, found at antique stores, etc. He proposes:
A: To throw out all of his furniture and yours and hire his abrasive interior-designer friend whose hourly rate matches your rent to refurnish the whole place with the most expensive, design-forward items he can find (that you will always be afraid to sit on or touch).
B: To keep his stuff, since he hasn’t paid it all off yet, and replace all of your stuff with new furniture you’ll buy on layaway, although you might have to do without a bed in the meantime, but it’s worth sleeping on the floor and racking up credit-card debt if you can get a mattress with two sleep-number settings.
C: That you give him your ideas on long-term decorating, implying that he’s happy to invest more in your shared home (because he earns more) and generally invest in your relationship.
If you answered mostly A’s . . .
Your date loves money so much, from the making of it to the spending of it, that he should probably be marrying it instead of dating you. If you’ve got it or are good at helping him play with it and revel in the respect it brings, you will have a good time together. If you need to be valued for your other attributes or don’t see money as the pathway to happiness, fun, and personal validation, you will ultimately disappoint this person, and after too much grotesque extravagance he will quickly make you feel as if you need a shower.
If you answered mostly B’s . . .
Your date doesn’t care much about making or keeping money, but her sensibility is less monklike and more mooch-rific; to compensate for her inability to spend or save wisely, she’s developed a nonmaterialistic way of getting others to pay her bills. Stay with her and you’re next in line to both manage and supplement her finances. Whatever you think you need to earn to support yourself and your plans, double or triple it if you continue dating this person (or don’t continue dating this person and just save up for professional matchmaking services instead).