Money Changes Relationships

When it comes to finances my husband and I are comfortable. That’s not to say you shouldn’t tip me hundreds of dollars on OF, I just quit my six figure job to be a stay at home mom so we will be decidedly less comfortable moving forward. But still, we’re fine.

For a large part of my poly dating experience my dates were almost exclusively college women. Because I was a college woman. And then I was a recent college graduate. And then at about 25-26 I realized I didn’t want to date women in college anymore. Depending on who you are, dating a 22yo college student at 25 isn’t that weird, but I just felt like I was in a totally different life stage and had nothing to connect with them on.

Anyway, the point of that info is that with me and Dakota both having technical jobs we had way more money than college students. So I always paid for dates. Especially since there’s not really etiquette on who is “supposed to” pay when it’s two women. As I’ve started dating women further into their careers, as well as started dating men, I like to ask what people do for a living to determine how I should proceed. Whether I insist on paying or let them split it. I try my best to not let other people pay for me.

It's tricky with men, they generally don’t let me pay. I went on a date with a teacher and teachers at public schools have their salaries available to the public. I looked him up because I’m nosey. I had to insist on letting me pay for drinks, I certainly didn’t want to say “I know that I literally make double what you do, please let me pay or I’ll feel terrible.” He finally let me pay as long as I agreed to let him get it the next time.

As I’ve dated more I’ve gotten more comfortable navigating this. There’s calculated manipulation that happens. For the most part I alternate between paying and splitting the bill so that I’m actually averaging about two thirds of the cost over time. On occasion I let them pay… for the cheaper places. I’ll let them pay at the place where our total bill is $30 and now they think we’re even, even though the last place I paid $80. Maybe it’s weird I put so much effort into spending more money rather than trying to save money, but I really can’t be okay with the poors paying for me.

To me, the great thing about having money is spending it on the people I enjoy. I had a friend who was broke as a joke and quite frankly was not good with money. She graduated with student loans that she was probably never going to pay off. After I paid off my loans I wanted to help her. I was going to give her a decent chunk of money for her birthday. I was thinking around $5000. The problem was that at the time I didn’t actually have much more than that saved up. I was making way more money than I ever had before. I felt rich. Me coming up with another $5k wouldn’t take that long. Dakota convinced me to wait. She was definitely still going to have loans by her next birthday, let’s be more reasonable for this one and let me save for another year. Then I could decide if I still felt like it was a good idea.

Lol. Lmao, if you will. We had a (second) falling out within that year and I am so glad I didn’t give her that much money. I would feel even more betrayed than I already did.

Last Christmas I’d been dating someone for two and half months and bought them a $200 gift, which like, whatever. Don’t care at all. But I also bought their partner a $300 gift to ingratiate myself. I had learned my lesson from my college friend, I had to be okay with pissing away $300 because there was a high chance I was going to resent their partner pretty shortly. But I’m nice, so I did it anyway. Secretly, this was the trial run. If they could make it a few months without making me feel stupid about my generosity I was going to open a 529 for their kid. With the amount I could put in without flinching and market gains in the meantime, I was planning on handing over about $15,000 for the kid’s college. Even though it was early, I really thought this might be a long term relationship and I might be around long enough to see their kid go off to school.

Once again, lol. Lmao. As much as gift giving is a love language of mine I’ve learned I should stick to things like baking cupcakes or making custom art for people. It’s not that I feel like someone “owes” me when I spend money. But I view the money as kindness and I would like (non-monetary) kindness in return. Which seems to be asking too much. At least when the gifts are small or homemade my brain doesn’t tell me they have “$5000 worth of hate” towards me, whatever that means. At least the apathy or disdain or annoyance is not quantifiable. I can’t help but automatically put a price tag on how much they don’t love me, so let’s keep the price low. Maybe I’m rambling.

Obviously on the other end of things people are often not super receptive to receiving expensive gifts and especially not straight up being handed money. I’d love to truly make it big to where I’m rich enough that my friends don’t feel weird about letting me splurge on them. Unfortunately, with the recent change of going down to one income, that will probably never happen. Not only that, I need to make changes to my relationship with money. How will dating change for me in the future? At least I won’t be able to accidentally lovebomb partners with money. I don’t know. I never really know how to end these posts tbh.