Dating Up: A Profit and Loss Report

by Ruzielle Ganuelas

For the last three years, I’ve been deep into my Saturn Retrograde. If you’re not into astrology, imagine an angry god swinging a wrecking ball across all sectors of your life and destroying everything it hits: health, relationships, financials, spirituality, and dogma. In three years, I changed homes, work locations, and jobs three times. I’ve seen three medical experts and three therapists for three major physical and spiritual maladies, and as I’m nearing the end of my retrograde, Saturn axed my three-year relationship.

I read somewhere that in every relationship, one person ends up being the CFO — but if you’re really lucky, you find someone whose financial values closely match yours. I was the CFO of the union, and he was like a spoiled scion who spent money like it didn’t come from hard work. Our relationship was a smoothie blend of hotel living, boozy dinners, plane tickets, and general money wastage. My life was upturned so drastically, I wrote about this relationship frequently to help process unsettled feelings. I always felt like this wasn’t the life I was meant to have, like a relationship changeling, and I never stopped plotting to run away.

To help me deal, I read and re-read The Girl with No Shadow, from Joanne Harris’s Chocolat series. It’s about true love, witchcraft, and chocolate, but more importantly, it’s about the true meaning of roots and security. Does money buy security? If it does, how much money is enough money to keep our roots from giving away?

When I met my ex-boyfriend, I was in awe of his life and his roots. He was solidly blue collar, but made it to the top tiers of the white collar tower. His family members call him “Mr. Moneybags,” a title he seemed to relish given the amount of money he gives away. His Boeing friends call him “Al Capone,” because of his penchant for hotel living. Right after we started dating, he was living in a La Quinta. I spent most of that first year living at La Quinta with him, and taking all our meals in various restaurants. Our first date was at an overpriced, yuppie Mexican restaurant, and he tipped the waiter so well he shook his hand vigorously, bro-hugged him, and called him “sir,” the rest of the night.

The longer we stayed together, the more this scene played out in front of me. Some overworked server waits on our table, and after paying, the server comes to our table to hug him for the exorbitant tip he left. He’s one of those extravagant tippers we read about online, and when I waitressed in another life, I always fantasized about a customer like him — come in for a meal, and leave a $100 tip.

At first, it was very fun. He was like Gatsby, he had hundreds of shirts and silk ties, and he would have bought me a unicorn if I so desired. My friends loved him because he always paid, and he was always up for another beer. His idea of a good time was to take me shopping. My priciest possessions and life experiences happened at this time: $200 jeans, $300 Nordstrom’s suit, my phone, Wolfgang Puck cookware, $600 tablet (which he broke after a drunken night out), Montreal in the winter, Savannah in the summer.

He told he plans on taking me away from the drudgery of blue collar work. He always said, I was too “polished” to be one of “those people” forever. I always disliked that remark, as most of the successful people I know were blue collar. My father built his sizable assets on blue collar work, and most of the money in my portfolio came from tip money I made in the past.

We used to have long, boozy dinners with his industry friends, with hopes that their white collarness will magically transform me into one of them. Inevitably, talk circulated amongst three pressing issues: money, professional contracts, and how soon they could make more money. At a steakhouse, I looked around the table and realized there was a million dollars in salary divided between the three men. With all that money, one would think talking about it would be trite, but it was all they could talk about. I quickly gained a reputation for being the “nice, quiet girlfriend.” I never let on their babble bored me, and all I could do was smile and nod at appropriate moments, and made myself as small as possible.

Soon, none of my clothes were good enough, and they were sent to Goodwill. Throwing away my clothes felt like I was giving away pieces of my self, the parts he wanted nothing to do with. First to go was my much-loved red coat, like the one Chocolat’s Vianne Rocher wore to Carnival, and my Mad Max boots. I caught on, and started buying clothes I didn’t like but matched what all the cool girls were wearing.

He also insisted I find a pricey dermatologist to keep my occasional hormonal zit at bay, and the good doctor fed me a steady diet of antibiotics. He signed me up for a gym membership because my yoga practice, the one thing that made me happy, “wasn’t a real workout.” I still don’t entirely enjoy going to the gym because I signed up for it under duress. Out of nowhere, my life has become a lot more expensive than it’s ever been. Even my 1,100 square foot apartment wasn’t big enough; he wanted more space so he could take his brand new furniture and flat-screen TV out of storage and dump them onto my future bigger apartment.

Another woman would have feasted on this relationship; a man with money and unafraid to spend it is red velvet. Some of his ex-girlfriends gladly handed over their bills, but that could never be me — I’ve always paid my way. I’ve burned through vacation pay flying up to see him at different points in the East Coast, only to be left alone for hours in hotel rooms. I paid for some $100 dinners mostly on booze I didn’t drink, and I spent hundreds on presents to balance out the uneven gift-giving dynamic and to assuage the guilt of receiving a Nordstrom’s shopping bag.

Ultimately, the money runs out. With him, as Hemingway once wrote, it happened gradually and then suddenly. $10,000 in cash disappeared from his accounts in two weeks. Once he was cleaned out, he went to the bank of the patient girlfriend. I’ve wired him $3,000 more times than I want to think about, $2,500 for child support and the rest, on incidentals. He always paid me back, always, but not after a lot of screaming fights and multiple anxieties keeping me up nights.

The first two years we were together, I stopped putting money into my IRA and I still mourn that lost time. It gave me a pain wondering where my hard-earned financial stability went, and in turn, I worked way too much to regain that lost feeling of financial independence. It’s hard to say what kept me stuck. Maybe, like Vianne Rocher, I thought his white collar resume and throw-around money would protect me from wolves that could come at me.

After I broke up with him, I emptied my house of the things that I owned when I was someone else. I already feel like my old self, the one who absorbed personal finance and prudently put away money in different accounts. The past few years gave me the experience of what it’s like to be someone entirely opposite of me. After all of this, I realized what I really wanted was my own life, me before the $200 jeans and the impermanence of hotels.

Ruzielle Ganuelas eats, blogs, and works in Washington State. Her dream is to finally make it to Paris.

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