Meaningful Returns

Here’s a story from my marriage: But let me back up: I hate watching movies at home in the dark. Like, who decided that when we sit down to put a movie on in the living room we have to go around turning all the lamps off? Oh, is it because your sense of lighting is so finely tuned that having lights on will just COMPLETELY ruin the tone of the movie for you? Ahh, yes. Of course. Mordor, despite the Orcs running around, is just not quite as evil when you can also see the popcorn sitting on your lap.

But back to my story. My wife Amy and I had been married for, I don’t know, two or three years? And I didn’t grow up watching a lot of movies, but Amy loves them, and she had slowly been bringing me up to speed on her favorites. I say this to tell you that we were watching quite a lot of movies (by my standards). And we were always watching them in the dark. So every time, I’m like, You’ve GOT to be kidding me, but I didn’t say anything out loud, because everyone is terrible at being married when they get married, and communication isn’t something that you really do.

Well, one evening we go to put a movie on, and start turning off lights, and I finally get up the gumption to blurt out something like, “why in the world do we always have to turn the lights off for a movie?”

And Amy said, “I don’t know, I thought that YOU wanted the lights off.”

Richard Rohr said, “Vulnerability transforms you.” Brené Brown, I’m sure, would say the same. Vulnerability not as unbounded oversharing, but as a sort of risky trust placed in a good friend, a dish of open honesty you might be trying out for the first time.

The problem is, we’re not good at vulnerability. Some of it is just part of the human condition, and a lot of it is part of the American condition, and there are all sorts of other contributing factors and nuances, but it all serves to make most of us vulnerability-averse.

When it comes to money though, we’re not even talking about it, much less stepping foot in vulnerability territory. We would rather talk about literally anything but money. Politics? Absolutely! Religion? Definitely! Sex? Of course! Money? Nah, nahnahnahnahnah. Nope.

And so what happens is, because we don’t talk about it, not even with our best friends (not even with our significant others!), we observe and assume. We observe the cars friends buy, and the houses they live in. The clothes they wear, and the gyms they attend. The vacations they take, and the golf clubs they swing. And then we make assumptions based on those observations (what else could we base them on? We haven’t bothered to, I don’t know, have a conversation with our friend). Then we take those assumptions and compare them to the observations that others are able to make of us based on the things that we buy (no one knows whether we’ve actually bought them or come to some other arrangement with creditors or generous relatives). If that gap seems too big, or we don’t understand it, we tend to buy the things that will close it as best we can.

By now I hope you understand how crazy this all is. This is part of the reason we buy stuff we don’t need or particularly even want, part of the cause of artificial poverty: We see other people doing the same thing, and instead of talking about it, we all engage in the financial version of Amy and I both sitting in the dark, watching movies, wondering how the other could possibly enjoy such a thing, when in fact neither of us do.

What if, next time you’re together with good friends, you asked a simple, open-ended question: What do you guys think about money? And then just see where the conversation takes you. You might be surprised to find out new things about the people you love, and it might challenge you to be a better friend, a friend that listens compassionately to the worries and fears and delights and joys of others.

Whatever you do, don’t keep sitting in the dark.