Let’s Get Something Straight: Is It Just Money?

January 12th, 2008

My 47-year-old coworker K tells me her husband is the cheapest man alive. He’s the one making her work part-time and he’s the one worried about their income. He’s in sales, she hasn’t said in what industry, and commands a high salary. So when she’s angry with him, she tells me, she spends his money.

“The kids had a great Christmas this year because I was mad at my husband,” she says. “They got all sorts of stuff.”

The rest of us laugh like crazy when she shares these stories. She’s a wonderfully sweet woman who loves her children, you can tell, and she is easy to work with, easy to laugh with. We split our sides at the thought of her, crazy with a credit card, packaging purchases to make a point. We laugh too, I think, because we are shocked and surprised and maybe a little jealous that she can be so open about her financial habits. Who admits, out loud and without embarrassment, that she spends in frustration? Who admits she does something a little unwise with her money?

I, for example, don’t tell my coworkers that for a first date I almost always want a new outfit. I don’t say that I could probably shop every weekend without getting bored or that right about now I’m itching to take a trip somewhere. My other coworker T avoided for weeks telling us that she used to eat on $3 a day, back when she was starting out, that she has been living under a drug-dealer in order to keep her $425/month rent, that her parents practically threw her out the door at 18.

It’s hard to talk about money.

I submit that one of the big reasons we don’t talk about money is the same reason I love to PF-blog. It’s very, very personal. And because it’s personal, there’s big opportunity for approval, intimacy, judgment and, largely, rejection. I love the anonymity of my site (which I’ve questioned sometimes and truthfully still catch myself worrying about and then censoring my words) because I can, in theory, say anything without being judged. Or, if someone does judge, he or she doesn’t really know me anyway.

Money is hard for people to discuss because it affects so much of life: where you live, how you live, potentially how you feel about yourself and your friends.

I’d like to change this, sometimes. I’d like to out-with-it and tell the world my financial status. I’d like to start a trend of it’s-just-money thoughts among my friends. But I fear that’s not possible. I fear what would really happen is I would bare all and regret it.

I guess, bottom line, is there’s a part of me that fears what it would do to my relationships and how it would hurt them. Because while it is just money, and money’s not life, my friendships are valuable and delicate and worth preserving.