Marriage Illustrated with Crappy Pictures (9 page)

I tell Crappy Husband what I said.

He is appalled that I lied. But, you see, I didn’t lie!

It’s all in how you say it. “Unfortunately, we can’t attend. We’re going to a birthday party for a friend.” Both of those statements are true, they just aren’t related. It’s true, we really are going to a birthday party. And it’s true, we really can’t attend.

It isn’t my fault if the person connects the two statements together.

WHERE THE MONEY GOES

Where does it go? I could blame the kids and how they eat a single bite of a banana and then say they are done. I could blame our assorted DIY projects and hobbies. I could blame the fact that we live in an expensive area of the country. I could blame a lot of things, but this is the real truth. This is where the money goes:

SPENDERS VERSUS SAVERS

Apparently, some people are spenders and some people are savers. Classic couple trouble happens when you have one of each in a marriage. One person consumes expensive designer clothes or electric tools, while the other person saves twist ties from bread bags and reuses coffee filters.

When we first got married, we didn’t have this problem. We had a different problem. We were
both
spenders.

Hey, did anyone pay the electric bill this month? We’ve never forgotten long enough for our lights to be shut off. But we’ve certainly enjoyed our share of late fees for this sort of thing.

Two kids and a mortgage later, we’ve had to become a little bit smarter about this so the lights don’t actually go out, but we’re still not as responsible about money as we should be. We’re still not savers. We’re at an in-between level that I call save-to-spenders.

We don’t save to save. Now we save to spend. We still have a lot to learn. But at least we pay the electric bill first.

THE CABIN IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE

I grew up in a rural area of the Midwest. Things were cheaper there. When we start to worry about money, I stress about the expensive area that we live in. You can’t even buy romaine lettuce for less than a dollar here! We’re gonna starve!

Which results in panic:

“I’m serious!”

“We can’t grow our own food in the garden we already have; we’re terrible gardeners!”

“Yeah, but I don’t mind hard work and we’d be better at it if we were in the middle of the woods.”

“Why?”

“But it would be so much cheaper!”

“There is a good reason it is cheaper!”

“Why?”

“Because nobody wants to live there.”

“Hey, can you run to the market? We’re out of romaine lettuce.”

“Sure, as long as we don’t have to move to a cabin in the middle of nowhere.”

“Fine. It’s a deal. We won’t move. At least not this month.”

SOMEBODY STOP US

If I were pining over diamonds and he were pining over platinum golf clubs, we could argue each other out of buying these over-the-top things. Well, the good news is that I don’t wear much jewelry and he doesn’t play golf. The bad news is that the things I want to splurge on are the things he also wants to splurge on.

This means there is nobody here to stop us.

But at least we can drown our regret with good wine.

THE CAREER SWITCH DEBATE

When we start stressing about money, sometimes we decide that maybe we should drastically change our careers. Big results require big change, right? Plus, when you’re having money worries, the responsible thing to do is to take out a giant business loan for a vocation you have zero experience in.

We’ve recognized this pattern, so now our conversation is always the same:

See, that’s the thing. We often think we want something, but we’re wrong. What we really want is much simpler.

Take opening a restaurant. Sure, we want to open a restaurant. Doesn’t everyone? The food! The atmosphere! But wait. Do we really want to spend every night there and manage staff and deal with customers and basically live there? No. We just want to go out to eat at a restaurant.

Or running a bed-and-breakfast! Everyone thinks they want to open a bed-and-breakfast. Me too! Such a romantic idea! Oh, how lovely and relaxing it would be! But it is all a facade. I don’t want to wash sheets and serve people and deal with reservations and angry travelers. All I really want is to
go
to a bed-and-breakfast and read novels on a bench in the bucolic countryside with lavender in the air.

This conversation ends with us realizing that what we really want is to just go to a club, restaurant and a bed-and-breakfast. Simple right? Except all of those things cost money. Darn.

WHO SHOULD MANAGE THE MONEY

Marriage and financial experts say that the person who is best at managing money should be the one in control of balancing the finances. We can’t follow this advice. It would look like this: