LOVE & MONEY — LINDA BESNER

I’m working on an oral history book called Love & Money.

It’s about how people share resources in marriages, in families, and among friends. It’s also about how people feel about money, and how money makes them feel about themselves.

The book alternates between essays and interwoven oral history vignettes.

The vignettes are drawn from fifty interviews, in which anonymous subjects discuss vastly different experiences with love and money. The essays engage with the ideas of “value” that underwrite our economy. You’ll hear how economists describe negotiations within families, and you’ll encounter classical examples like the Rotten Kid Theorem, the Samuelsonian finesse, and the parable of Romeo and Juliet and spaghetti.

Have a great love and money story that you want to share? Get in touch at lindabesner at gmail dot com

You can read an excerpt of the book below.

I. A woman tells me a story about an umbrella. When it started to rain, she was at a music festival she had long been looking forward to, and she bought the umbrella at a stall for ten dollars. While the rain fell the umbrella enhanced her happiness. The woman doesn’t remember all the details, but I picture her protected by a bell of brown and navy plaid. In her hand, the cheap glint of a faulty springloaded stem.
Then the sun came out. The umbrella was now a hassle; crowds jogged her elbow, and she had other things to carry. She decided to abandon her purchase.
The umbrella was impeding my enjoyment, the woman told me. I was willing to let it go.
Her boyfriend was shocked by her cavalier attitude.
Ten bucks was a lot of money for us at the time, the woman concedes. He said to me, I can’t believe you are so wasteful. It really irritated him.
It turned into a big fight, and rather than let the woman throw the umbrella away, the boyfriend ended up carrying the umbrella himself.

Money is so gross, Linda, a man tells me.
He’s starting a business as an esoteric counsellor. At a recent bank appointment, his career failed to appear in any of the drop-down menus. The teller quirked an eyebrow. Can you just put “other,” the man asked. It’s grief and anxiety counselling, he explained, and then some modalities, like reiki, tarot, crystalwork, mediumship. It’s kind of niche.
He is newly married, and he and his husband were at the bank consolidating their finances.
I basically hate money, the esoteric man says. I don’t believe in it and think it’s fake and completely a statement of fear and, as a student of vibratory realities, it’s all a really gross lower vibration.

I ask another man what money is.
I think it used to be sheep? The man says. Then it became bits of metal somehow?
The bits of metal came to be stamped with the emperor’s head, he thinks, and it had something to do with wanting gold. It wasn’t exactly clear to the man why people wanted gold, maybe so you weren’t carrying sheep in your pocket.
And it gradually became more and more fictional, the man says, until now what kind of guarantee is it, it’s a bunch of digits swimming around in a financial market and who knows what it will be worth tomorrow.

The umbrella woman’s mother grew up extremely poor.
When I told her I wanted to be an artist, the woman says, she was sick with worry. My mother always talked about how terrible it was to not have enough to eat, she was determined from a young age to make a solid amount of money. We weren’t rich, but we were middle-class or even upper-middle-class at some point so I think I was a little spoiled—I knew that if I really needed it my parents could give me money.

My mother always really respected someone who could hold their own, the esoteric counsellor remembers. As a kid, I would buy my own ice cream with my allowance because I could see it impressed her when I said I wanted to pay for it. I used to think money was fun and magical and exciting, he says.
In high school, there was a class trip to Italy. The esoteric man’s parents viewed this as his financial responsibility; it was his trip, so he should earn the money to go. The man got his first job at thirteen, years in advance, with the sole purpose of saving the $3500 he would need to go.
I didn’t need money in my day-to-day, I still got my lunch packed for me and got driven to school, the esoteric man says. I remember being so proud on that trip that I had paid my own way.

The sheep man’s most expensive impulse-buy was a guitar. Shiny silver and gold, with electric-style pickups and a hollow body, embossed with a delicate raised pattern.
I needed to go to a gig after work, the man says, but I had forgotten my violin. I felt bad, it seemed disrespectful to the band to show up without an instrument, so I walked into a music store thinking I would buy a pennywhistle. But I walked out with a thousand-dollar steel guitar.
He had recently inherited some money from his grandfather. He’d been spending it fixing his front porch, which was falling down, and renovating the kitchen. It was his girlfriend, Samantha, who had wanted the kitchen renovated, but for some reason, even after they broke up and she moved out, he kept on going with their plan. The house was also empty of furniture, since it had all been hers.
I had to buy a carpet and a coffee table, the sheep man says, and I went on a spending spree to refill my life. In the process of redoing the kitchen, people came and said the boiler was rusting from the inside. The boiler cost eleven thousand dollars. So the guitar seemed…you can see how you start to lose perspective.

My parents were really not like that, the umbrella woman says. I never asked for money and they never offered.
She worked as a waitress to pay the bills while developing her artwork. Sometimes she skimped on groceries, skipping lunch when money was tight. But it felt like a choice.
I think maybe I was stupid? Money didn’t mean much to me, the umbrella woman says.
In romantic terms, rich men were never an attractive prospect. There was something alien about putting money at the centre of your life. When she met her partner, he was a student and she was still waiting tables.
So we had equally no money, the umbrella woman says.
They broke up, and when they got back together a year later he had graduated and started working in his field.
When he told me how much he was making, she says, I was like HOLY SHIT.

I got my first office job out of university and I thought, I’m Donald Trump! I work nine to five! the esoteric counsellor says. I take an elevator to the forty-second floor and now I just have to climb the corporate ladder, become a CEO, then you buy a house and a vacation property and a boat.
He rode a carousel of cabs from restaurants to concerts to shopping malls. No public transit touched his oxblood loafers.
Think of how in my teenage years I had been so proud of saving my three thousand, the esoteric man says, and saying to mom and dad, Look what I did. Cut to eight years later when I’m sobbing into the dining room table saying to them, I don’t know what happened but somehow I owe thirty thousand dollars in credit card debt…help?

The sheep man’s mother had a childless best friend who became terminally ill at sixty. The best friend had run a department of the British civil service; she had a nice flat and a good pension. She left the sheep man a hundred and thirty thousand dollars.
My mum suggested I buy a house, he says. This one was two hundred and forty thousand, but there’s always some mystery with my parents, if I need something they’ll always say, Oh well, good news, there’s some other money your grandparents left that we didn’t give you.
His parents transferred him the rest of the money. He wouldn’t need a mortgage.
When I bought the house I was twenty-five, the sheep man says. Not a red cent of it was mine.

I was shocked, it was so weird, the umbrella woman says. I think it was weird for him too. He was kind of a different person.
Now that her partner had money to spend, some of his habits and interests seemed to have changed.
I was like, what the hell, you got into antiques? Suddenly he wanted to go antiquing all the time, the umbrella woman says. And he said no, I’ve always been into antiques, I just couldn’t afford them. I mean now he has a collection of antique wooden coat hangers.
Their place together started filling up with carefully chosen objects—vintage rather than simply second-hand.
We have some beautiful umbrellas now, she says. I try to be extra careful with them because I know they matter to him.

I was wrought with guilt, I was wrought with shame, I was crying all the time, I felt consumed by it, I felt buried, the esoteric counsellor says.
The debt was beyond anything he knew how to dig himself out of.
I couldn’t look my mother in the face, he says. They felt like they had failed to teach me properly.

By the time I was buying the house at twenty-five I felt my life had already been going on too long, the sheep man says.
He had been going to the doctor for his heart palpitations; he often felt he couldn’t breathe. The doctor asked him to wear a special cuff equipped with electrodes. The sheep man’s heart bolted in panicked sprints across a laboratory screen.
It’s so common that this is what turns out to be an anxiety condition, he says.
For several years, he tried to manage the problem without medication. He did workbooks and talk therapy, and he regularly had incapacitating panic attacks. He was exhausted and depressed.
When I was buying the house I was mostly concerned about being lonely, the sheep man says. I was not an at-ease social person. Buying a house as a single person alone is weird.

I didn’t ever value having a house or car, I fought him on the house thing for a long time, the umbrella woman says.
But at some point she decided she wanted children. Owning these other things seemed like a necessary condition.
And then in the…the place that sells cars, she says, what is it? Yes, god, the dealership, thank you. In the dealership I got kind of swept up and talked us into buying this new car rather than used. I really liked the car! And I didn’t want to worry about it breaking down. So I’m to be blamed for it too.

When I went on dates during the time when I was racking up debt, the esoteric man tells me, I was very like, Don’t worry baby, like—he snaps his fingers—Hollywood, like, I’ve got this.
When he fell to earth, his dating life changed.
Then when I had my own Great Depression crash and felt like oh God what have I done, my life is over, the esoteric man remembers, then when I went on dates I was very blunt: I’d say, Good thing I’m hot, and if you want to buy me dinner and eat shrimp, go ahead, but I can’t pay for anything. I can entertain you, I can make you laugh, but I can’t contribute anything beyond this nine-dollar bottle of Malbec.
During that time, he realized in retrospect, he dated a lot of older men.

I couldn’t figure out whether the house made me better for dating or worse for dating, the sheep man says.
It was a joke with his family (was it?) that having a house might make women want to date him, that it made him seem like good stock.
One thing that started early, the man says, was that I felt I had to always tell people I hadn’t earned the money for the house. I was actually worried people would think I was some kind of weird capitalist investor type who had somehow earned all this money by twenty-five.
The house itself was not in a cool part of town, and people seemed to find it vaguely strange.
I had sort of decorated it like it belonged to someone of my grandfather’s generation, the sheep man says. I had liked the house because it was sort of old-fashioned, and everything was sort of red velvet and brass and brown wood, so I bought that type of thing to match. Possibly people thought I was a vampire.

Our stroller got stolen off our front porch, the umbrella woman tells me, and later I saw it sitting out front of the safe injection site. Like I know who stole it. The house we bought is near a homeless shelter, we’re part of the gentrification of the neighbourhood.
She was irritated, but she knew that for her it was really only a minor inconvenience.
I can see how the stroller is super useful to them in the winter—instead of a shopping cart, she says. It was great for groceries when I was pregnant with my second, you can put tonnes of stuff in a stroller if there’s no child in there.
The stroller’s sturdy grey frame now carries a new owner’s burdens.
It’s definitely weird, the umbrella woman says, in that I can see when I walk around my neighbourhood there are a lot of people in need and I feel like, am I greedy if I want nice things in my house?

By the time I did meet James, the esoteric man says, I had been through some healing.
He laid out his experiences, explaining to James what he had done wrong and what he had learned. James was younger; he had comparatively less financial experience, and he was fuzzy on interest rates and scared of money.
So we’ve made the decision to combine everything, the man explains, all our income and debts are shared. And now I’m the financier doing all the books and making the banking appointments and taxes and everything—I never thought that would be me! It certainly doesn’t sit comfortably, but I’m also like, ooh, does this mean I have truly healed the guilt and shame of my past?

When Samantha moved in we’d only been dating six weeks, the sheep man tells me. But she was paying twelve hundred in rent and she’d just lost her job and we were getting along super well. I was super pleased, I thought it was a great deal—I’ve finally found someone I super get along with and I’m super attracted to and who is super smart. Finally! I was thirty-one, I was so relieved. And ready to get on with being domestic.
The house became less vampiric—the brass and red velvet were tactfully replaced.
But money did start becoming a thing after a few years, the sheep man says, because a lot of our conversations were about trying to equalize the men and women stuff in the world. Right before we broke up I had actually gone to a lawyer to draw up paperwork to divide all the assets fifty-fifty because it seemed that this would be the thing to make everything equal and take away all the stresses.
But they were fighting so much, this stopped seeming like such a good idea.
The sheep man says, I started to feel like, maybe giving away half the house when I basically want out of this relationship isn’t the way forward.

Now that I’m home with our second baby, the umbrella woman says, Rob is—well no, he’s not supporting me, I’m on EI, but he definitely pays for more stuff.
Her labour taking care of the baby has no wages attached.
There’s a funny thing where he wants all our money to be joint, the umbrella woman says, but my mother always told me it was important to have my own account, or at least my own income. So I have an account of my own as well as our joint one, but Rob has nothing independent.

When they met, the esoteric man made more money than his partner. But now James has built a successful business, and the esoteric man, who is starting out in a new career, isn’t making much yet. It’s a major reversal.
I’m realizing I’m having a really strange wave of emotions because you fall into the same old trappings, the esoteric man says. Thinking things like, It’s not my money, am I worthless, I’m not really contributing. Like sure I do the laundry and the cooking and the dishes but what is that really? If I go grocery shopping I feel like, oh, should I not buy the more expensive eggs because it’s his money?
A chicken’s happiness—her feet in the grass—is a luxury.
The man says, I have to convince myself that James is not sitting there resenting me. I can’t choose that insecurity, that guilt, I have to trust in the marriage. I’ll be thinking, you’re not doing anything, you’re just spending his money, you are a piece of shit. And I have to be like, Stop! Get thee behind me, Satan, I say no to that thought, I send that thought away.

The sheep man is married now. And money is one of the issues they fight about.
I would say it’s one of the great fault lines, the sheep man says, it’s a cracky, crumbly part of the foundation.
He was brought up to believe that it’s important to own property and build up savings. Because of his anxiety condition, he struggles to work full-time, so he tends to worry about not earning enough or putting enough aside. His wife feels much more guilty about the free house.
For her, the sheep man says, the issue is do we have too much money and have we put too much aside. For her it’s like, we don’t earn enough to deserve this lifestyle with a house, we should be more precarious because that’s what we deserve.
The sheep man doesn’t argue that buying property with inherited money is fair. Only that sometimes that’s what happens.
The sense that I might have to punish myself for being too bad and lucky is scary, he says, because I didn’t know I would be held accountable, and trying to pay back everything I didn’t earn now would be quite expensive.

I have these moments where I really panic, the umbrella woman says. And I think NO, we have to move out of our house and sell our car and, you know, stop wanting nice things. So I can focus on what I really want to do. But then I change my mind the next day.
The trouble is that she wants more than one thing. She wants to make art and to have a family and to support herself.
I’m not making as many sacrifices as I could for my art, the umbrella woman says, but then I have young children and I just feel that I can’t. Grownups in this town have very different dreams, it’s all about babies and houses. It can be hard and frustrating and lonely in that sense.

That’s why I have to be on top of it, the esoteric man says, where those fears and insecurities and shames trickle in and I work hard to rid myself of them quickly because that will keep me in a lower vibrational position and that will equal less income or more hardship around monetary things.
He’s trying to worry as little as possible, to keep his energy positive. At the same time, he is trying to get a business off the ground, and he does have to keep an eye on what the numbers are telling him.
I’m like, wait, should I be worried? the esoteric man asks. Should I be panicking?

I’ve always sort of felt that I’m quarrelling with right-wing politics and attitudes towards money in a different way from my friends who have less, the sheep man says. I feel like those more conservative people were at school with me.
It makes sense to the sheep man why people choose to be selfish, and to barricade themselves against uncomfortable thoughts about the suffering of others.
I feel like the moral fight I’m in, he says, is between the people who think we should use our power to encourage a bit more egalitarianism versus the right. But in that sense, I feel like I’m among the rich and if the revolution comes I’ll be up against the wall too.
I wonder if he is imagining actual blood-stained brick walls, or the rusty blades of real guillotines.
When you don’t have very much money, the way people behave who do seems monstrous and evil, the sheep man says. But really it’s just how people behave when they get more money. It’s the same people, basically.