Though this is but a sampling of our money issues, the financial repercussions of our relationship will be the last for this story. Lisa made twice as much money as I did, and when she descended into a drunken and/or manic state she would castigate me for it in uncertain and very belittling, emasculating terms. When we met I was quite forthcoming with her about the company of which I was a part. She knew it was a startup and how tenuous it was. I earned $35-40,000 dollars and all of it went to us and our family needs. But we were always in financial straits, and our combined incomes were around $110,000 throughout most of the relationship.
The last six months she found a new job (the fifth in our time together and another red flag) that paid her in excess of $125,000. We were always bouncing checks even after I negotiated a $1000 overdraft with our bank. We still managed to end up in the red, month after month, paying thousands of dollars in overdraft charges. After borrowing thousands from her parents to help defray those costs, we found ourselves deeper than ever in debt. She’d felt so guilty about how she treated her ex-husband that she’d given him the house in the divorce and assumed the mountain of credit card debt that they’d created. Plus, she paid for her daughter’s medical insurance.
I traveled quite a bit on the job and she’d rent movies while I was gone and never return them. Once when checking how much of our DVD rentals were late charges it turned out to be over $1,500 over a three year period. More than it had cost to rent them. We had bitter fights over finances. Four times during our relationship, including twice before I moved in with Lisa, she incurred cell phone bills up to nearly $1,500. I talked the providers into dismissing most of the first two bills, because I still didn’t know enough about how Lisa operated and I believed her when she suggested it was their fault and not hers. I learned never to take her to the phone store to fix the bill because the first time we did, she yelled and screamed at the salesmen in front of the whole establishment. It was shocking to me.
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