When my boyfriend and I first met, I probably had about five hundred dollars in the bank. The other five hundred had gone to my reasonable rent in a shared house with his sister and brother, which was how we met. I had returned a year before from living for two years out of my backpack in Asia, and while I was there, the most I lived on was twenty dollars for the day. I had come back completely transformed, but I had also come back beyond broke. I no longer owned a car and took to riding my bike. I had also learned a thing or two about the greater good while I traveled impoverished nations, so I returned to my home soil with a desire to work in the non-profit world. I fell back into living paycheck to paycheck like most people I knew in San Francisco, no matter how much we all made. And while I was no longer tempted by the city’s consumer culture and the little voice inside my head which used to whisper, “You need that,” I still had a less-evolved way of dealing with my money. I spent money as a reaction to my cravings.
My early twenties were about looking good, wearing the right clothes, and spending way beyond my means. Back then, I took the inventive approach to money by pending my grandmother’s inheritance: I shopped, booked excessive weekends away, and wrote checks from my investment account for drugs. I had to be fun and have fun. And while I ran around dressed in costume for the next big San Francisco party, my boyfriend-to-be lived in Idaho and started his own timberframe and construction businesses. He was thirty-three when I met him, and he had built as many houses as I had danced parties and traveled countries, with one of his houses built into a cliff overlooking a canyon. He had money and investments to show for his hard work, while I had lots of great party stories and a worldwide education. One of the reasons he was attracted to me was because of my free-spiritedness. One of the reasons I was attracted to him, outside of his softness and outdoorsy good looks, was his resourcefulness.
Our first road trip together was over Memorial Day weekend in 2003. We had been dating for two months and I flew to Idaho to have him show me what he loved most about his home state: its rivers, mountains, desert, untouched wilderness, and the fact that he could pull off the side of a desolate road and find the most spectacular campsite only a stone’s throw from a natural hot spring. I was smitten.
It wasn’t until we stopped at a Subway for sandwiches that I knew I was in for a learning curve with this man. I was ahead of him in line, ordered my Veggie Delight, grabbed my Sun Chips and my iced tea, and shuffled down the line to the cash register. I pulled out a five dollar bill to pay for myself. When we got back to the car, my boyfriend spoke up.
“Are we always going to pay our own way?” It was a valid question, especially since we hadn’t planned the trip outside of using an atlas. His comment first led to a discussion and next to a resolution. He would pay for gas and any other expenses while I would pay for food. We agreed that since he made above and beyond what I might ever make working at a school, it evened things out by being split that way.
