In Which Our Hero Gets Serious About Money

I may be dating myself a bit here, but my junior year in college, a craze unlike anything since the Macarena swept the nation and became one of the most important zeitgeists of the new millennium.  What is he talking about?  What could it possibly be?  I see you shiver with antici...




pation.

I am talking about Joe Millionaire.

Shhhh...don't speak...

The conceit was simple.  A bunch of eligible bachelorettes, many possessing vast tracts of land, would be whisked away to a mansion where they would attempt to win the heart of the hunky bachelor, who just happened to be well-endowed in his stock portfolio.  However, like all good reality tv shows, there was a nefarious twist.  Joe Millionaire was actually only pretending to be rich.  In reality, he was a poor poor member of the hoi polloi.  A common man.  A proletariat even.

As you can see, lying about your finances is an integral part of reality tv

Week after week, Joe would weed out the crazies and the gold diggers (not mutually exclusive, see, e.g., the above photo).  In the end, he picked his girl, Zara aka the Disney Princess, and revealed his secret.  She chose to stay with him.  However, like all reality show romances, they broke up later.  He went back into obscurity.  She went on to a very successful career as a spokeswoman for NutriSystem.  No, we're not making that last part up.

For me, aside from the hilarity of any sort of reality show (although this one sadly lacked in the "I will put you over this couch" moments), there was this very interesting subtext:  Which is more important, love or money.  In other words, would a woman stay with the man she loved despite the fact that he was a hobo?

But what Joe Millionaire failed to address was the fact that it's so difficult to extract love from money and money from love.  Any relationship needs to have a foundation of mutual attraction, respect, and trust, but without that fundamental sense of security, it's sometimes hard for a relationship to get off the ground.

Recently, a friend of mine broke up with his boyfriend of a few years.  What upset him the most wasn't that he had necessarily broken up, but that he had gotten into a relationship with someone who he didn't necessarily have as much sparkage with, but was, in the long run, able to provide a sense of stability and security.  He felt like a fraud.  He was supposed to be in a relationship for love and love only.  Eventually, the lack of sparkage began to take its toll.  They broke up.  And he felt lost, confused, and mostly angry at himself.

Isn't it funny that any story about couples and money can be illustrated by pictures of the Salahis?

I think it's high time we jettison this notion that love and money are polar opposites.  While I think we rightly lambaste anyone who enters into a relationship solely for money as a gold digger, how many people do we know are in relationships based solely on (sometimes misplaced affection) and we want to smack them and say "Jesus Christ on a Tricycle, why are you still with this person?  He/She/It is wrong for you for ALL these reasons" and they respond with "But I truly love him/her/it!"  Need I merely point to the previous post as an example of this?

Bella seriously.  He's 100 years older than you, he wants to kill you, and he won't even put out.

But money can be tough in any relationship.  How do you find that balance between security and dependence?  How to you extract yourself from a relationship if actual independence may not be an option?  And can you ever have a truly intimate relationship if money is always in play?  I'm not quite sure how to answer those questions.  But it's not wrong to think about them and seriously ask them of yourself.

Love is an integral part of relationships.  But so is security.  Finding the balance between the two is hard.  But relationships, in general, are hard.  The only thing we can do is try to find our way to balance the two as best we can, and be honest about what we need.  And if our relationships don't work out for any reason, then just brush yourself off, remind yourself that you're awesome, and throw yourself back into your life.  Because really, cats and kittens, if you're awesome enough to be reading this post, then you're awesome enough to have a kick ass life, whether single or in a relationship.

So tell me, gentle readers, what are your thoughts on this eternal debate?  How do you try to balance the two?  And is it wrong to sometimes put security over love, even if just for a little while?