How do you handle money?

At one point, on our last date, D asked me if I could help her with the cost of her airline ticket. I understand why she asked -- most of my expenses were being picked up by my company, so the financial impact of the date fell disproportionately on her. And from time to time she has mentioned that if we are going to be involved in the long term we have to be able at least to discuss money rationally.

I didn't react too well at the time, however. Instead of being able to discuss it calmly, I sank into a depression that lasted much of the evening. Recently as we were talking on the phone, she tried to ask why I reacted so badly, and again the conversation didn't get very far. But it left me wondering about myself, and in a while I was able to see at least parts of an answer.

The first point, and the most basic one, is that I am not at all consistent in how I feel about money. Anybody (like D) who tries to deduce my underlying attitudes about money by watching my behavior will end up very confused, ... because the behavior is confused. It is not, as I say, consistent. I can fret and agonize over small sums, and then write out large sums without blinking. It makes no sense.

Or rather, the sense it makes is a kind of complex emotional sense, and I am not sure that I can identify all the pieces. One piece is that I don't grok money terribly well, and so I don't enjoy thinking about it. I'll do it as a chore, because I have to; and Heaven knows I'm better at it than Wife. But the very fact that it takes me so long each weekend to make myself sit down and do the bills -- and that after all that angst and delay I'll only do what is absolutely necessary, postponing the rest -- is a sign to myself that I would rather do ... if not "almost anything," then certainly many other things. So there is a measure of discomfort there, from the get-go.

Because I don't grok money very well, I rely heavily on constructing for myself some kind of frame-story when I am dealing with a financial situation, and these frame stories allow me to see the situation as a picture, where the decisions I have to make become obvious. So when Wife spends a handful of change on a spool of thread in a color she's already got, I see it as part of a frame-story about hoarding and greed and compulsive acquisition and waste. Those are all very ugly things, and I react by hitting the roof. If I then have to turn around the very same day and write out an installment on Son 1's tuition at his new high school -- a sum which, by year's end, will have added up to something in the neighborhood of ten thousand times more than the spool of thread (just for the sake of round numbers) -- I see it as part of a frame-story about prioritizing my children's education, and I'm very calm about it all.

What is more, it can sometimes be difficult for me to shift gears, to re-frame the same event in a different story. Or say rather, that I can do it but I don't find it easy to do on the spot, on the fly. So when I am travelling on the company's dime, for example, the narrative that is running through my head is a narrative about, "How am I going to account for myself to the mysterious trolls in Corporate Accounting?" And part of my thought is that I am given a lot of leeway precisely because I have never run afoul of the system. My fear is that if I ever do slip up, I will invite a lot more scrutiny in the future ... and I'd rather avoid the extra scrutiny. So any time D and I go somewhere in the context of one of my business trips, I hear a little voice in the back of my head murmuring this narrative over and over. It makes me fretful trying to parcel out expenses into the two buckets, Corporate and Personal (totally regardless of how much money -- or how little -- we are really talking about). And so it can be a lot harder than you would think for me to stop that Corporate-oriented monologue long enough to break in with a simple question like, "Is this expense here really all that important in the big picture? Isn't that expense there really remarkably cheap if it spells the difference between being able to see D and not?" These are obvious logical questions, and anybody who felt comfortable with the topic of money would ask them as a matter of course. But because of where I find myself with relation to the topic, it can be awkward to get from here to there.

So far as I can reconstruct it, what happened that night during our last date is that we were driving out to dinner somewhere, which means that the Corporate Accounting narrative was already nagging endlessly in the back of my head. Then en route D asked the question about her plane tickets. I think what happened inside my head was that somehow this threw me -- without even stepping on the clutch to shift gears -- into an entirely different frame-story whose message is, "Hosea, you're a cheapskate (or you would have volunteered to help with her tickets without waiting for her to say something)." I don't say that's what she was trying to achieve, but that's how I remember it from the inside. And so I was rattled: partly from the sudden change of narrative; partly because the new narrative concerned a bill (her airfare) that was probably going to be ten times anything we could possibly spend on dinner that night, and I was already fretting about dinner (because of the whole Corporate-accounting mantra); and partly because I would do almost anything to avoid being thought a cheapskate. Emotionally, I was being pulled hard in two flatly opposite directions; intellectually, I was trying to see the situation through two incompatible sets of lenses. And I shut down.

Great, now what? Well, in the aftermath of our somewhat unconstructive phone call, I sent her a check for some fraction of the tickets. At that point, because the conversation had been so difficult, she actually felt funnier about accepting it than I did about writing it. But I think this business of competing frame stories explains my side, at least. Really, none of my reactions had anything to do with the amount of money in question. But time and distance allowed me to shift my internal frame story. And once I had done that, the thing was much easier.

I don't know if there is any kind of advice here for the future ....