A little while after I wrote the post two weeks ago about what money is for, I began to feel uncomfortable because it sounded too confident. Not that there is anything false about it as it stands, but just that it doesn't make clear how recently I came to these conclusions. But there were many, many years before when I was a lot more lost around money.
I've already alluded to this in other posts, like this one. But really my confusion went back a long time. On the one hand, I adopted an air of magnanimity in paying things for other people: the idea was to be able to wave my hand in a relaxed but dismissive gesture while saying, "It's not a problem." And in truth I very much thought about money (when spending it on others) in terms of this little theatrical gesture, far more than thinking about it in terms of (say) arithmetic. I wanted to be able to look unconcerned. I think I learned the gesture from my father, and I copied it carefully.
On the other hand I avoided spending money on myself if I could at all help it. But even here I wasn't completely consistent. I didn't mind buying myself snacks, for example. But when it came to buying something more substantial, I would deliberately choose the least expensive thing I could find rather than buying something I liked. In fact I adopted a habit of deliberately overlooking what I wanted, in order to spend out of necessity instead of pleasure. I remember once I was buying a telephone for my apartment, and I specifically asked if they had one in black. I didn't want black; I didn't think I would enjoy black. What I thought was that it would be appropriate because it was so basic, because if I had a black phone then nobody could think that I was buying things for frivolous reasons like the pleasure they might bring me. If black was good enough for the Model-T, it should be good enough for me. Really, my attitude towards myself was almost punitive. (In fact they didn't have black so I settled for beige, which I enjoyed a lot more.)
In some cases I chose practicality over aesthetics in order to make a point, but it was still about creating an identity for myself -- an austere and intellectual one. One Christmas my father asked me what I wanted and I suggested a calendar would be useful. He got me a "calendar" that was a long poster of a naked girl stretched out on a sand dune, with the twelve months listed at the bottom in small type and a string of numbers 1 to 30 (or 31) underneath each one. Right. A calendar. I refused the present, saying that it was no use to me because I needed something that had boxes in it where I could list upcoming events or deadlines so I wouldn't forget them. But there was more to my refusal than that. I resented what appeared to me to be my father's overt attempt to pander to me, to offer me something that was more or less pornographic (no matter how artistically done), to try to excite some kind of desire in me. His seeming need to stand in the role of a procurer for his own son just disgusted me. And so there was no way I could possibly have accepted the calendar. At the time, though, I was not sufficiently self-aware to articulate all these reasons that I hated it so much. So I jumped on the one reason that I could articulate and that I felt comfortable saying aloud: the calendar was impractical. And I made other choices, step-by-step, to re-enforce my identity as someone who would turn down such a poster on the grounds of practicality. I chose to have things around me that were useful rather than beautiful.
I was also afraid that my own taste in what was beautiful might be childish or shallow, that I would expose myself to ridicule by saying "I like this, I find it lovely." I knew that back when I was a kid I had liked certain kinds of designs, but they were the kinds of designs associated with the fantasy or science fiction subcultures, or with the hippie friends of my parents back in the 1960s. As a college student in the late 70s or a young adult in the early 80s, could I still have such tastes? Or would I do better just to abjure beauty altogether? In the event, that's what I did.
In fact, I realize that I took this fear of beauty to extremes. My girlfriend in college was not beautiful: she had sharp features (particularly a sharp chin) and she often pulled her hair back tight on her head to look "severe". (When she would let her hair fall loose and let herself smile, she softened the effect considerably.) [Update years later: This was Marie, in case you were wondering.] And then Wife, when I met her, wasn't especially pretty either. Oh, her face was pretty enough, but even then she was heavy enough to have a visible belly. I don't mean just that she had some gentle cushioning around the edges (which I find quite attractive in a woman); she was fat. But during the ramp-up to my decision to propose to her, I consciously told myself that my awareness of her physical looks could have nothing to do with her value as a person.
I seem to have wandered a long way from my theme: I started out talking about money, and ended up talking about beauty. This may be indicative of how confusing I found money for so many years, however: I made financial decisions based on non-financial reasons, assuming that somehow the money would work itself out; and I denied myself the things I enjoyed, as a point of principle. Then of course after I was married I found that I had to think hard about how we spent our money (because Wife wasn't about to exert any self-control), and I also found that she self-denial which had become so natural to me was something I could never sell to Wife at all. So I resorted to shouting and screaming, which seemed to be the only argument she could hear.
So far from learning to think about money more intelligently, this last development simply covered my earlier confusion with a thick layer of emotion and anxiety. It didn't help me get any better clarity. And there I sat, until -- decades later -- my affair with D and my progressive distancing from Wife allowed me to experiment a little bit with spending money on myself. And then I started to look at the whole question a little more coolly. It has been an improvement ....
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