Ben and Me_ From Temperance to Humility - Cameron Gunn [42]
{ A penny saved is a penny earned.}
But that’s not the way marriage works. It is not the stuff of fairy tales and imagination. It is, like the rest of life, something of a struggle. Children, jobs, houses, housekeeping, mortgages, credit cards—all of it. These are the killers of romance, the assassins of amore. When marriages work well, they are part of the shared joy and journey, in some cases—as with children—the best part. But they don’t make it easy to be Prince Charming.
And if there is an evil stepmother in this already jaded fairy tale, it is money. Study after study has pointed to money as the principal area of conflict for couples. It is little wonder in our credit-heavy, beat-the-Joneses, consumer consumption society that money problems would be number one. Arguing with my wife over our finances was not part of that romantic, stress-free, wedded bliss that I imagined. But neither was my gaining fifty pounds and losing most of my hair (Michelle probably hadn’t anticipated that part either).
We don’t know what we’re getting when we marry someone. The choice of a mate is a big sloppy soup of emotions and genetics and pheromones. I suspect that some people wake up and discover that they won the spouse lottery. Others feel like Ling Ling the panda: captive and expected to reproduce.
The majority fall somewhere in between. If we’re lucky, our expectations and reality aren’t that far apart. When my wife married me, I’m not sure what she thought she was getting, but I suppose she hoped that she was getting someone who could at least bear his share of the financial load. Once again, I’ve been a disappointment.
It’s not that I don’t earn a reasonable income. I do okay. It is simply this: Whenever money comes within twenty feet of me, it is instantaneously repelled by some mystic force. Like two similarly charged magnets, my pocket pushes away money at a speed that my online banking system can barely track.
Anyone who has viewed my wardrobe, looked at my vehicle, or taken a mental assessment of the consumer items around me would be surprised to learn that I am not frugal. It is apparent that I spend very little money on myself—at least on things that are tangible. In fact, if you asked me where my money goes, beyond some mutterings about how expensive children are or about being mortgage poor, I really couldn’t identify how it is that I’ve managed to accumulate a smaller savings account than an eight-year-old paper boy. All I know is that despite my reasonable income, my lack of expensive tastes, and a wife who is diligent about tracking our household expenses, I epitomize the phrase “paycheck to paycheck.”
Michelle, in her desperation to explain the situation into which I have immersed her, will tell you that she was very good with money before we met. Working two jobs while going to college, she managed to save a substantial amount of money. Then I came along, and whatever magic she had with currency disappeared. Now she struggles mightily, aided only by the Internet and a dubious receipt tracking system. Michelle does battle against my innate ability to dwindle away our finances with no apparent vices—at least not expensive ones.
I’d like to offer her some explanation, but as I said above, I am at a loss. On days of particularly low self-esteem, I simply say that I am bad with money. More charitable days bring the logically flawed justification that my inability to accumulate wealth is something of a positive trait. I am unconcerned, I rationalize, with money. Money is a base, demeaning method of exchange and nothing more. Gold (or more precisely the want of it), as we all know, is the root of all evil. We are awash in a sea of consumerism, I trumpet from my soapbox,