I Love to Hate Spending Money

My boyfriend lives in an old suburb, where the Walmart has all its beauty products locked down because people keep stealing them. He drives an Infiniti and loves great italian food, wears a lot of Polo stuff, and has about five bank accounts. I really should have expected that when we shared our Christmas desires, he would tell me he wanted a very expensive gaming thing.

“You have expensive taste,” I told him. “All I want is a nice blender.”

“Yeah, well, you should know me by now.”

And I do. Of course I should have expected it. But I also, of course, had to let him know how I felt about his taste.

“We don’t even have money like that, is that really what you want? That’s like four hundred dollars!”

“There shouldn’t be a price on making me happy,” he said. “I don’t turn you down for nothing, long as it’ll make you happy.”

I had to pause. This was true. A nice meal, tint job on my car, new bag, one of those armband phone cases (for the iPhone 6, which areimpossible to find) so that I can be encouraged to run more often without sweaty palms…I mean, the man can’t say no to me. But I had to realize that every time he asks, I can’t seem to say yes.

Why? Maybe it’s because I grew up in a home that cared about money. But then, so did he.

It could be because I turned my life over to Minimalism when I was in college out of state, broke as fuck and determined to not let my one-pair-of-pants-having-ass feel jealous or embittered because of it. I hate spending money, even while I love to have things, like this Mac that I’m writing with/on now. Not only do I hate spending money, I hate people who seem to carelessly spend money, when they could doing X,Y, and Z instead!

The truth of it is, I love to hate spending money. Perhaps it reassures me of my level of environmental consciousness, while also reasuring everyone around me of a deep-rooted narcissism.

A nugget of wisdom I’ve shared that I once read in a Lucky magazine is the $1 rule, which is as follows:

“If you’ll use it once for every dollar you’ll spend on it, buy it.”

Will my boyfriend use his gaming whatever 400 times? I seriously doubt it. Is this why I hate to buy it for him? Um…I guess so.

Or is it a demented sense of self-righteousness instead? I’m not just a cheapskate, like those people on that A&E/TNT/HGTV show (I don’t know, we don’t have cable). But I, the sometimes-vegetarian, bohemian, minimalist person that I am, feel somewhat obligated to hate such spending habits. What else could you with that $400? You could adopt an endangered whale! Why, you could even adopt an African child for mere cents each day!

Not that I would do anything with the money. I would save it away, look at the number in the account. Then I would dip into it for expensive coffee treats and organic soaps over the course of the next few months until, alas, the well dried up.

“Where’d that money go?” My boyfriend would ask.

I wouldn’t have a fucking clue.

So which is worse?

As a woman who has put in massive hours at a job I hate, it’s hard for me to imagine being frivolous with something that people work so hard for. We work hard to make our paychecks, and there are non-English-natives who work hard to cut the trees to make the paper for those paychecks and their own every day. Do we throw away all that work, from all those people, for a gaming thingie that we’ll use a handful of times in the moments between fucking and sleeping?

I can’t answer that question.

But tomorrow, I’ll be dipping out on my boyfriend to hunt around for deals on this gaming machine. Maybe I just need to lighten up. I mean, lighten my load. Nobody said that I personally must carry the weight of the world on my shoulders. That’s what we’ve got Jesus for, after all.

And you know what? If it will make him happy, fuck it. Just fuck it.