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In Fight Club (the book and the movie), the narrator finds it impossible to keep attending the support groups he needs to help him sleep at night when he discovers another tourist, Marla. He negotiates with Marla to split the groups they attend reasonably evenly. The criteria for divvying up the supply are at times tricky to apply. Marla does not have testicles -- she doesn't really belong in testicular cancer, right? Then again, she does have cancer, and most of the other men in the group no longer have testicles, either. And the rest of the tale clearly indicates she has balls in the colloquial sense (something we all wonder about the narrator).
Whatever your relationship, whether coworkers, friends, lovers or fellow tourists at support groups, you both need to have a support system as individuals, and you need to respect each others support systems, both while the relationship continues and, as depressing as the prospect may be, after the relationship ends.
You each have friends that the other doesn't particularly care for, and wouldn't have picked for themselves. Some of these you will wind down while you are in the relationship, others you should maintain. Only you can determine which is which. A variety of feelings can help guide you. If your partner strikes you as clingy, you think they need to spend time with their own separate friends. If you feel isolated, you think you have lost contact with your own separate friends. These feelings may or may not reflect objective reality. By understanding these feelings, you can decide whether to change your behavior, ask your partner to change their behavior, sit down to decide mutually the best course of action, or get help in changing your feelings. Changing your feelings is a legitimate option. If you have lived a long time by yourself, and are now in a close relationship with another person, your feelings will be oriented toward a solitary, individualistic existence. You may need assistance reorienting them toward a more interdependent, involved existence.
Certain basic rules of thumb can be used to help guide your behavior while you are getting in touch with your feelings and learning how to act and feel harmoniously in a way that leads to greater happiness for you and those you choose to share yourself and your life with.
All of these rules can be restated in the positive form as if . . . then . . . statements. If you date your roommate, then you may have to move when it ends badly, for example. Pick the formulation you prefer. You will probably break the "don't" part of the above rules; just don't lose track of the "then" portion. Have a plan to cope with the "then" portion, and try not to be surprised if you discover the plan doesn't work perfectly.
What applies for your support system also applies to material things, time, and other resources. Later chapters will address specifically issues such as taking turns and planning the course of your relationship mutually and consciously. However, some general principles should be obvious, but are easy to ignore when everything seems to be going well. This is, unfortunately, the best time to apply these principles, as they are more effective at avoiding trouble than they are at correcting problems when they arise.
If you live separately, and spend all of your time in one person's space, everyone will pay. The person whose space is occupied will feel infringed upon while the visitor is present. Or at least they will feel their closets infringed upon. And when the visitor leaves, in a huff, or for good (or bad, as the case may be), the person whose space is usually occupied will feel abandoned. The visitor will find their own space feels like a hotel. They will feel rootless and without a home. They will feel they have been kicked out when their partner doesn't feel like having them around. Their stuff will be scattered, contributing to a sense of lack of control.
If you live separately, spend time in each other's space. Ideally, the same amount of time, but accounting for every moment to guarantee a 50/50 split with respect to time is every bit as bad as the same activity with respect to money.
A lot of commentators have written and spoken a lot of words on the subject of gender relations and how marriages and other relationships between men and women are unequal. Some have focused on equal pay for equal work. Others have drawn attention to The Second Shift (Arlie Hochschild), in the form of unequal work at home. Still others draw attention to body image issues, and unequal expectations of physical appearance between men and women. Then there is the issue of accounting for the difference in resources brought to the relationship, whether property, money, time or talent.
What we have here is a problem inherent in all negotiation, in all bartering. The preferred way of solving the problem of exchanging goods and services is to monetize, or I should say, "dollarize" those goods and services. This works relatively well for apples and oranges (although problems arise even here, but environmental activism is, I'm afraid, beyond the scope of this particular work). It works less well when the item is less familiar to the customer, when there are fewer customers, and when the supplier is ignorant of the larger market. While I don't much like suggesting that a relationship between friends, or between lovers, is economic in nature, lots and lots and lots of other people have said it before me and they do have some valid points to make. I'll just note that I find attempts to attach a dollar value to the goods and services provided by someone who does a lot of work in and around the house somewhat distasteful. I realize this is done in an effort to get people who insist on comparing their salary to work done by a spouse to value the work done by a spouse. I still find it distasteful.
It can be tempting to simplify the exchange by arriving in a relationship with one's own home, checking account, retirement plan and domestic skills (cooking, cleaning, taking out the garbage and doing one's own laundry) and expecting the same of others. If you try this, you will discover you have limited your choices to almost exactly the same degree that those who marry money have. Good luck to you. You'll be needing it. You won't need the luck to find what you are searching for; you will need the luck to create a successful relationship with that person once you have met each other. Because people who don't actually need anything from each other, and who don't get anything from each other, who don't depend upon, who don't rely upon each other have a hard time building any kind of relationship with each other.
It can be tempting to simplify the exchange by arriving in a relationship a whiz at some life skills and unwilling to even attempt others. Generations of relationships have been built using this model. Usually someone specializes in making money, maintaining the car and the exterior of a house, lawn care and taking out the garbage, while the other specializes in spending money, picking the car, maintaining the interior of the house, cleaning (everything) and cooking. You can try it. It can work. It doesn't require luck. It does require work, patience, an attitude that looks like bemused tolerance or patronizing contempt towards your partner. Relationships like this are founded on a refusal to have any understanding or competence in areas in which the other person is competent. If a party to a relationship of this sort decides to become competent in one of the partner's areas, odds on, the relationship will destabilize and possibly end.
In all likelihood, without any particular effort on your part, you've got a weird mix of abilities, incompetencies and aptitudes, some of which you don't even know about yet. This is actually for the best. As you adapt to whoever you spend a lot of time with, you can learn from them (in those areas you have an aptitude and/or interest but where their competency exceeds yours), you can help them (in the reverse case) and you can divvy up the rest of the stuff. Best of all, neither one of you will be particularly good at a lot of the less pleasant tasks, which will make it easier for you to take turns thereby reducing resentment. Your relationships will tolerate change (because that will be part of the dynamic from the beginning) and, when they end, both of you will, in some small way, have changed for the better.
Any relationship, whether friends, coworkers, lovers, clients, what have you, that involves shared time and/or money (that would be any relationship) will have some sort of accounting system or system associated with it. In much the same way that procrastinating constitutes a decision, no method for accounting for time and money in a relationship is a method for accounting -- it's just not a very good one, and it contributes to chaos. Rosanna Hertz covers several accounting systems in More Equal Than Others. The book is about a decade old, and specifically about dual-career couples. As it happens, the latter limitation almost compensates for the former. Love Between Equals by Pepper Schwartz covers some of the same ground, but with more of an agenda. She Works/He Works by Rosalind Barnett and Caryl Rivers is more recent, has more data and more of a rah-rah approach. The major pitfalls lie in expending too much effort to make sure that all resources are exactly accounted for and exactly evenly split all the time and in allowing a substantial imbalance to develop on one side. The former is usually the result of believing the individual is the basic unit of the relationship, and that you are competing with each other for scarce resources. The latter may be the result of a communications breakdown (if only one party is aware of the imbalance), a power struggle (if both are aware, and they have decided to try to maintain the relationship in this state), or one or both parties to the relationship lacking one of the basic life or relationship skills dealt with earlier in this work (probably they don't even realize what their own feelings and needs are). If both parties perceive a substantial imbalance in the other person's favor, all of the above factors may be in play simultaneously, and couples therapy might be a Real Good Idea. If you can't salvage this relationship, you should at least try to get some understanding of what went awry, and get assistance at learning what you need to know and do in your next relationship to make a new and different (and hopefully better) set of mistakes.
It's easy to lose track of how mechanical accounting systems really are. Do you each have a checking account? Do you have a shared account? How do you decide who pays how much of which bills? Do you alternate supplying food? Does one person always cook and the other person always pay for meals at restaurants? What is the exchange rate between the two activities? Whose name is on the lease or the mortgage? If you hang out with her friends on Wednesday night, and your friends come over on Saturday, is that equal based on number of hours or is one night of the week more valuable than the other? Getting wrapped up in creating hard and fast rules to cover all of these and every other related issue is going to make trouble for you, but ignoring bad feelings that arise when someone perceives inequity is at least as bad. Talking about these kinds of issues and communicating expectations is probably the minimum to make a long term relationship of any sort work out. It can be a very short conversation, "I'll get this one and you can get the next one," happens at lunch tables every single day. Pay attention to the response (this is a great time to exercise your skills). If you interact with someone whose expectations are more than you can afford to live with (they expect to see you every evening from now on; they like to go to restaurants you can't afford to eat at; they have season tickets that make your eyes bug out), they should demonstrate some sensitivity. If they treat you, they should have some idea about what you could do to reciprocate that they would appreciate as much as however they value what they are offering. They should be willing to verbalize it. If they aren't willing to verbalize it, even when the issue is raised ("I can't afford to go to the opera. I don't feel comfortable accepting this invitation, since I know I can't reciprocate."), I think it fair to suspect them of bad manners, possibly of poor character. If you want to offer something out of scale, there are a number of axes to consider. If you cook a great meal for someone who can barely heat up mac 'n' cheese, reciprocation on meal scale means they probably have to buy you dinner, but not necessarily. They could bring you along to a dinner party someone else throws. But they don't have to reciprocate on the meal scale; they could switch to entertainment at home, and have you over for movies with popcorn, chocolate and beer. They could switch to the minor personal service scale and give you a ride to the airport if you're heading out of town. Avoid scales that make you feel like you lose, or make the other person feel like they lose. Look for scales that make you both feel like this is someone who makes your life better, easier or just plain more fun.
If you live together and especially of you marry, the temptation to combine all accounts will be real. Fight it hard. It's very important that adults have access to some amount of money, however small, that is their money, and that they need answer to no one for how they spend it. At least in a highly monetized society, this is part of what it means to be an adult. Any expenses that one partner doesn't understand, but the other perceives as crucial to his or her happiness are best paid out of a separate account. It's much better to decide how much each will to contribute to the shared, agreed upon expenses (including saving for shared goals), than it is to pay attention to where the remaining funds go.
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Copyright Rebecca Allen, 2002.
Created February 9, 2002 Updated November 19, 2003