Green with Envy : Part 4

Green with Envy: A Whole New Way to Look at Financial (Un)Happiness
by Shira Boss

(Page 4 of 7)

That led into the second problem: keeping up appearances. One does not set out actually to lie about unemployment or financial stress, but they're not polite or comfortable subjects. And since my husband had started a company and was no longer actively job searching, people probably assumed he was doing fine. For my part, I didn't want to complain to friends about us not having enough money because they would guess it was due to my husband - since I was still working as I had - and that felt like an invasion of his privacy. It's not nice to complain, even worse to blame. We are taught that financial problems are personal, and they are especially personal when they involve a third party not participating in the conversation.

So when people did ask how my husband's work was going, I found myself replying Good! With my family we kept matters equally oblique. They surely picked up hints that we weren't doing great (like when we mentioned we might just skip going home for Thanksgiving), but we didn't go out of our way to explain the situation and they didn't ask. Even in the twenty-first century, it is expected that a man, if not the sole support of his family, should contribute at least half of the household income. Even though there are alternative arrangements that are increasingly accepted, in general men who don't earn the socially prescribed amount have an element of shame to contend with that women do not experience. So I didn't feel entitled to disclose our details, especially since he had relocated halfway around the world specifically for our relationship. In the meantime, I endured some conversations like this one with my older sister. On the telephone, I complained vaguely about not being able to afford something, but she cut me off abruptly:

It must be nice to have two incomes, though!

I could have asked her what second income she was referring to, but instead I just sighed and hedged and hinted, common tactics when it comes to discussing money.

Well, I said, it feels like supporting two people on one income.

No kidding that's what it felt like, because that's what was going on. I just couldn't come out with the truth.

Privately, money was making our life miserable. I got itchy and irritable trying to work in a home office with someone else at home. He left when he could, but without being able to afford recreation, he resorted to wandering the streets or sitting alone in the park. It made matters worse that he had left his entire social circle behind to move here.

Determined to be responsible, we tracked our expenses in detail. But when we saw how much money we really needed to be making every month to cover our fixed and necessary expenses, we got depressed and stopped keeping track. Overwhelmed, my husband abandoned exercising and gained weight. I became a nagger. To keep pace financially, I took on more work than I could reasonably handle, and late at night, to get my mind off of the stress, I went to bed hiding behind the latest Harry Potter.

A couple of times I went trolling the Internet for some kind of support. Surely there had to be somebody talking about this kind of situation, about handling the social side of financial problems. Wasn't there a money doctor out there who could make us feel better?

I had never before understood why money is the often-cited number-one reason for marital trouble and divorce. I had guessed it meant that couples, having two separate personalities, couldn't come to terms on how to handle the household money. Through experience, I realized that it is money itself, as a very real character in our lives - a companion that is as cranky, consuming, and irresistible as any lover - that causes the strife. It's the secrecy, the shame, the acting, the convoluted psychology of it all. We live in an ultra-open culture that freely shares our most intimate concerns - but rarely when they involve money. When it comes to the intersection of our personal finances and the orbit of the world outside our front doors, we are suddenly starved of the information that gushes on any other topic. I knew that other people were in our same shape, miserable because of their financial situations and even more so from the stress of covering them up, from leading a kind of double life. But how to communicate with those people? I couldn't even find them on the Internet, which meant that for all practical purposes we were indeed alone.

As for my friends, even though I was not direct with them about what was happening with us, I felt let down that they did not read between the lines and figure it out for themselves. I expected support and some kind of commiseration, even though their openly acknowledging the situation might have been embarrassing. In the meantime, their own endowments bothered me in a way they never had before: Every time a friend openly indulged herself, I was reminded that I couldn't afford to do so. I started wanting things I had never even wanted before, merely because I knew I couldn't have them.

The problem we grappled with that became the most damaging was the eventual rise of resentment. These were the first two years of our marriage. That we were being cheated out of what was supposed to be one of the most wonderful times in our lives frustrated me. What did we do to deserve this? I wondered. Through my gray-tinted glasses, every other couple on Broadway seemed to be having the time of their lives. I was sure that come Monday morning, each went off to their respective jobs, and when they got home they frolicked. I imagined their lives as cozy and romantic, not consumed by financial worries. Everyone is enjoying life but us, I convinced myself, even as I knew it wasn't really true. I laughed bitterly when I read an item in a women's magazine about how if a man earns less money than his partner does it often damages the couple's sex life.

In the midst of our angst, John and Tina, to our eyes, fit right into this carefree, honeymoon mold. So even though we had resolved to concentrate on minding our own business, Tina quitting her job to extract every second of joy out of life seemed to us like some sort of personal insult.

Copyright © 2006 by Shira J. Boss

About the Author

I grew up in Flint, Michigan, a gritty but wonderful place to grow up. I studied economics and political science undergrad at Columbia University, and went back there for master's degrees in journalism and in international affairs. In between, I've lived and worked in Saint Petersburg, Russia (where I edited the cultural section of the main English-language newspaper), in Paris (the only time in my life I've tried writing fiction - I'd rather wrap a boa constrictor around my neck now than have to make up a story), and in the Middle East (where I got to live the low-paid but high-adventure life of a foreign correspondent).