There’s an episode of Sex and the City when Carrie and Aidan have finally broken up for good and he has given her an ultimatum to buy her apartment, which he bought for both of them, or to vacate. Although it’s a little impossible to feel sorry for Carrie given that she has spent $40,000 on Manolo Blahnik shoes, the story goes that she does not have enough money to buy her apartment, good enough credit to get a bank loan, or a Sugar Daddy she can take from (although Big does write her a check, which she rips up). In the many conversations about her dire financial straits, which might make her a “Fendi bag lady,” two friends offer her some money toward the down payment, but Charlotte, her friend with the most money, looks away and refuses to help. She doesn’t want to even talk about money because she thinks the mere topic is gauche.
Well, talking about money may be gauche, but it also is one of the killer topics in any relationship: Communicate poorly about money and you’re guaranteed other problems too. I used to hang with an out-on-the-town set of townie girls, one of whom had more money than the rest of us combined. Each day she was wearing thousands on her body in designer jeans, jewelry, shoes, and tops. But she never paid the bill. I don’t mean she was never generous to pick up the bar tab (which is de rigueur in most relationships, the sort-of-even see-saw of bill-swapping generosity) but she also almost never paid her own way. There would be an uncomfortable pause and then one of us would offer to cover the check. Sometimes she would throw down a few twisted bills that might cover about a third of her cost. Often, as those with cash flow are wont to do, she would complain about how little money she had. When she wasn’t around, the rest of us discussed our problem. How could we possibly bring it up? Wouldn’t that end our friendship? Was she the kind of person who could gracefully take it? (It turned out not, because when I once suggested she bring a bottle of wine to a dinner I had paid for, and made, it was met with frosty indifference and no wine materialized, yet she did wear 7 jeans and carry her newest Angela Adams.)
In love relationships, money can tear the seams of even the most open of pairings. My longest-term relationship to date was with a guy who owned the apartment we lived in. Yet I paid rent. This was fine, in theory, because in theory his parents actually owned our apartment and he also was paying rent to them, despite his own name on the lease (for a tax break). Then one day when he was out I looked at his checkbook. Not one check in the past year of our relationship had ever been made out to the realty group that handled our apartment. Obviously the discussion of this did not go well — I had to admit I had looked in his checkbook, which somehow became the focus of the argument, not the deceit which had me paying rent to a family trust.
