“Do you have the ability to satisfy your obligations?” Helinger asked Terry.

“No, I don’t, your honor.”

“What do you have?” Helinger asked.

“Well, my personal bank account has $2,300. I have cash of $120 in my pocket. And my company bank account has $22,000, which is what is left from a $35,000 loan I took out to make payroll.”

It was clear the judge wasn’t happy with Terry, but I was surprised by what happened next. He found Terry in contempt and ordered him to give Murielle the $2,300 in his bank account and the $120 in his pocket. He had to pay Thacker another $15,000 within 10 days.

Pay, or spend 30 days in jail.

He paid.

If you have a half hour to spare over lunch and want to read a story about a couple’s terribly messy five-year divorce battle in court, this is the story for you. It’s quite sad, especially for the children involved.

I broke up with my fiancé over the summer due to a lot of unhealthy behavior on his part (all boiling down to honesty and money—how about that?). He agreed to let me keep the apartment for as long as I needed it, but then he started doing this fun thing where he would enter the apartment without warning. When he refused to give back his key and got aggressive, I knew I had to leave immediately.

I sent an email to my best friends explaining the situation, that I felt unsafe, and that I was moving back in with my parents. I decided that I’d commute back and forth to Boston.

One of my best friends and her wife-to-be was on the phone with me within two hours, asking me to move in with them. There wasn’t talk of rent, or an end date, or responsibilities, or the fact that they were getting married in two weeks. They just said, “We can move you in tonight.”

I love my generous friends to death, but when generosity trumps logic, things can go downhill pretty quickly, so it’s important to think things through a little more. Luckily, my parents instilled in me a crippling high work ethic, guilt complex, and sense of self-reliance. I insisted that my friends and I work out the following issues beforehand:

1. Establish a date that you both agree you should be out by. Mine was three months. I moved out of my apartment right when all the college kids were moving back to school. There was no apartment open for ages so this window was necessary. And even so, I had some budget stuff to work out so I could afford the first and last month’s rent, a deposit, and the monthly rent.

2. Pay some kind of rent. I asked how much, and they gave me a figure that basically covered utilities. I paid more. We all came out winners because it was still absurdly low, I didn’t have to pay anything else—not electric, not internet, not cable, not even food. But I was paying, and I’m sure that negligible amount of money helped them overlook some of my more annoying personality traits.

3. Chores! I think the fact that I washed dishes and made dinner most nights throughout the week made a huge difference. There was no set arrangement for this, but I would not have disagreed if there were. And if I couldn’t have paid rent I would have insisted on this. I speak for (almost) all filthy freeloaders when I say we do feel guilty, and we would welcome a work-for-shelter arrangement.

It all worked out in the end. I stayed with my friends for 110 days. I found an apartment with a roommate for a bit more than what my half was with my ex. My friends were 80 percent happy and 20 percent sad to see me go, and I felt the same way, but we’re still very close. They won an always available and very experienced dog/house sitter out of the deal. And sometimes before blizzards hit, I will go over, make them dinner, and sleep in my old room. Just for old times’ sake.

Liz Jordan maintains a blog about those months at htgo.tumblr.com.

There’s a lot of talk in the financial world about the singleton’s penalty. Economies of scale, you know. Two is better than one when you can split the bills and buy in bulk. And so on and so forth.

The thing is, while that may be true for some, my relationship actually costs me money. Here’s how:

Things I’ve helped him pay off

The recession wasn’t kind to us. He lost his job, and I (a full-time student) had to shoulder the bulk of our financial burden—bills, his car loan, repairs, etc. I can tell you no money was saved as a result of us being a couple during that time. Some of that I took on the shoulder, some is earmarked for repayment, though not with interest.

Utilities

Yep, we pay for cable TV to the tune of $50 a month. I held out as long as I could, but after a stint in a shared house where pay TV was just one of the bills, there was no going back to the desolate world of free-to-air channels. The boy is one of the few people I actually know who watches channels like History, Documentary, BBC, CI, National Geographic and Animal Planet. (I suppose it makes up for his total lack of interest in books. Don’t worry, he also gets in plenty of brain rottage through wrestling and cartoons.) We also add on the movies package (about $20) from time to time as we see fit, which really, equals pretty darn cheap entertainment.

We’re also in the odd place of having higher utility bills in the summer because he has the fan on constantly. Me, I’m cold year-round, winter or summer, and I’m used to bundling up and ignoring the shivers.

Rent

Were I not living with him, I’d still be living with flatmates. We moved to our current place (a 1.5 bedroom with garage) at his behest, mostly, and it costs $320 a week. I could probably save up to $40 a week on rent if I was still single and living in a shared house, but I’ll be honest, it’s so worth it not to. Don’t get me started on the flatmate horror stories I’ve accumulated over the years.

Car

I didn’t have my license when we first got together, let alone a car. Public transport and I are tight. I was all about living within 10 minutes of a bus stop and knew the bus and train routes and timetables like the back of my hand. But now, we have one car between us, which he uses the vast majority of the time (he drives to work, I walk) and we split the costs of running it—petrol, insurance, maintenance, registration, etc. Because I am a total nerd, I tracked all our spending for the year in 2010, and calculated that our car cost us about $4,000.

Obviously, I have some rather miserly tendencies. (That’s not to say I never spend money—but it’s usually on food, travel, or both.) But I’m happy with all the choices above-property prices are insane in Auckland, and there’s no way I’d ever rent a one-bedroom alone. Life here is pretty tough without a car, and sharing one is the perfect solution for now. Did I mention that I really, really hate driving? Having a built-in chauffeur is excellent. I highly recommend it.

Due to the current gap between our incomes, I’m essentially paying for more than half of our expenses at the moment. (I hasten to note that while I was studying and he was making more than me-before the Global Financial Crisis and the Great Layoff that followed, that is-he paid for most things, happily.) This is fine by me, though given that I’m naturally a saver and he the spender, I won’t lie: It does cause problems from time to time. If it was the other way around—the person earning more was also the bigger spender-then hey, it’s your money, your decision.

Our financial styles are different, and occasionally we clash, but by and large we’ve developed a system over time that works. Would I prefer he made more money? Of course, and it’s a goal of his too-the more we can bring in the better. Would I prefer he was more frugal? Sure, but then he wouldn’t be who he is. Since we’ve been together, he has gotten a lot less impulsive about spending money and conscious of value as well as price. If he was as big a penny pincher as me, I doubt we’d have much fun. What’s the price of love and companionship?

Esther Goh is a writer and blogger who currently has money on the brain. Photo: emilio labrador

This past winter, the guy I had been dating for a few months asked me to be his plus-one to a black tie wedding. We didn’t make it to the wedding, since he later broke up with me for having “too many feelings,” but in that moment, before all that, what I told him was that I had nothing to wear.

“So, I’ll buy you a dress,” he said.

I had been sort of mystified since we met about his financial situation. He was a film editor, but didn’t work much, as far as I could tell. He owned an apartment in Murray Hill that was notable mostly for the great bagel place across the street, but it had a doorman and it was his. It seemed clear that his parents helped him out, and even nearing 30, he still felt he could use those funds to buy me dinner, which he did with seeming impunity. The point of all this is that I didn’t ask questions, because despite how it factors into every moment of our lives, money is often the last thing we talk about in a new relationship.

“I don’t want you to buy me a dress,” I replied. And I didn’t, suddenly faced with all sorts of gender panic flags.

“Why not? You can’t afford it. Look,” he said, cutting me off, “we just won’t go out for dinner this week, and I’ll use the money I would have spent on that to buy you a dress.”

We were walking down Park Avenue. It was early spring, sunny but cold. I stopped short.

“Wait,” I said. “That’s not how it works. There isn’t some quota of money you’re supposed to spend on me each week.”

But there was, to him: I was a column on his expense sheet, and he could distribute those funds as he saw fit. This isn’t to say he wasn’t generous, or that I ever did anything more than meekly reach for my wallet at the end of another spectacular dinner, but I held firm about the dress, and the relationship dissolved soon after.

What is it that happens with money in relationships? I’ve seen it with my parents, with friends: with the exception of infidelity, no one thing has wrenched apart more couples than money, and the value judgments, petty arguments, and power struggles that come with it. In my most serious relationship, my boyfriend and I were just young enough that we could avoid talking about our finances if we wanted to, which we mostly did, for all of our eight years together. When we did argue about money, it was because I thought he spent too much on beer. Also sometimes cheese, but I really like cheese, so I griped less about that.

I’ve seen couples who split all income and expenses down the line, and others who are blindly proprietary. Some rely on government-worthy spreadsheets, while others maintain a strict code of silence. I’m fascinated by the myriad of ways in which partners approach these loaded, complicated issues. And since I’m currently exponentially single, I wondered if I might be able to work on my own financial hang-ups before I inadvertently screw up my next relationship by giving each complex a seat at the table.

Enter Zach Teutsch. Zach is a labor educator and financial coach in Washington, D.C. As Sandy was rolling up the East Coast, he and I chatted about happiness, power, and how your finances reflect how good you are in bed.

Meghan: Hi Zach!

Zach: Hi Meghan!

Meghan: Beautiful day out there!

Zach: Happy Hurricane Sandy to you.

Meghan: So, money! Could you tell me briefly how you got into what you’re doing?

Zach: Sure. While I was in college, I was very interested in how money related to happiness and fulfillment, and I lucked out to find a brilliant professor who worked on that intersection, Dr. Brooke Harrington.

After college, I went to work for a big union (SEIU) in their Capital Stewardship Program. It focused on pension policy and helping to protect members’ collective retirement assets. After that, I joined AFSCME to run their Investor Education for Working Families project, which helped that union’s members learn key financial and investing concepts. Eventually, the project moved to the NLC/AFL-CIO where it exists today. I got to help teach thousands of union members over the years.

Outside of work, I enjoy occasionally taking on financial coaching clients. A lot of my clients are couples in their 20s and 30s who are working on integrating their financial lives.

Meghan: Wow. There are a lot of acronyms up there. What was it was about the money/happiness balance that interested you?

Zach: I always wondered what it was that makes people happy. It was clear that money must play some role, but it was also clear to me that just having money wasn’t enough. And in some cases, it actually made it less likely that people would be happy.

Meghan: I was reading recently that the difference in the level of self-described happiness between someone who makes $30,000/year and someone who makes $70,000/year is substantial, but after $70,000 there are no perceived differences.

Zach: There is a lot of debate in the literature about how strong the correlation is between money and happiness, but everyone basically agrees that having enough money to subsist is important to being happy, but having enough to live a luxurious life isn’t.

Meghan: I find that fascinating.

Zach: Me too. Once a person is financially secure, then the strongest drivers of happiness are things like community, friendships, family connection, fulfillment (often through work), and a sense of giving back. Most of those things are free. I felt a little bit like a Hallmark ad when I said that.

Meghan: So do you see that emotional correlation a lot in your work? Like, do you become a de facto therapist from time to time?

Zach: Yeah, money issues are usually tied to broader relationship issues. You can’t competently work on money challenges without touching non-money concerns. Here’s an example: Lots of couples have problems talking about money. To untangle those issues requires understanding whether the couple communicates well about other things and where they don’t, why they don’t. Many couples, for instance, have a fight and then try to work on the underlying issues while they are still steamed. That doesn’t work for Becca [Zach’s wife] and me, and it doesn’t work for most other couples either. Whether the topic is money, sex, or in-laws, it’s best to talk about it when everyone is calm and removed from the thing that initially triggered it.

Meghan: You are a therapist! I knew it. So, was money something you and Becca talked about early on in your relationship? When is the time to have that discussion?

Zach: Well, Becca and I famously met on Craigslist. But in the housing section. She moved into the co-op house I lived in, so we actually had a financial relationship before we had a romantic one. Most people don’t have that experience. But for us, it was great to know we had shared financial values before we were together. For most couples, I think they mostly find out how the other views finance by watching rather than by discussing, which is too bad: It’s much more effective to talk about it! Most people don’t know where to begin though.

When I facilitate conversations about this, often when couples are thinking about long-term commitment, I start by asking for stories from their past. Emotion is very powerful in this area and much of that comes from our childhoods. In a sense, financial approach is largely autobiographical.

Meghan: Meaning how your parents dealt with money?

Zach: Exactly!

Meghan: I am acing this course.

Zach: Amen sister.

I ask people what they worry about when they worry about money. The range is surprising sometimes. Some people worry about running out. Others worry about having too much left when they die. Some worry about people trying to be their friends to mooch off them (we should all have so much money as to worry about that!).

Often worries are so specific that it is immediately obvious where they are from. Like, I am worried that things will seem good and I will switch jobs, then the economy will get bad while I am chasing my dreams, my startup will fail and I’ll wish I hadn’t changed jobs. Money is hard to talk about for lots of people. Especially people who come from families where it is taboo. Lots of families just. don’t. talk. about. it. So, for some, it feels transgressive, almost dirty, to have an open, frank discussion.

Meghan: Have you ever worked with a couple whose views were just wildly far apart? Do you ever think, Oh, well this isn’t going to work out.

Zach: It is very stressful when a saver and spender throw their lot in together, since there is a kind of judgment involved. It isn’t just that they have different approaches to money, but slightly different values.

Meghan: Right, it feels so personal.

Zach: Exactly.

Meghan: How do you get around that?

Zach: Savers often feel that spenders are judging them as un-fun. Spenders often feel that savers are judging them as irresponsible. Often, though, they aren’t! Just one of the reasons it’s good to talk. Sometimes couples learn that their fears about what the other thought just aren’t true. When that happens, there is usually a palpable feeling of release. They had been avoiding talking for months or years because of what they feared the other thought and then, it turns out, the fear was unwarranted. Chats about money are almost never as bad as anyone thinks.

Meghan: So, let’s say a spender and a saver get together—do you ever recommend that a couple not merge their finances?

Zach: I haven’t ever recommended that, but I have occasionally suggested waiting, baby steps, or a trial period. Some couples do better to keep finances separate for sure. It depends on how one views what it means to be a couple.

Meghan: What do you mean by that?

Zach: For instance, some couples view themselves as a team. That when one of them succeeds, they both win, and vice versa. Becca and I usually think of ourselves this way, so it is natural for us to have completely merged finances. Other couples think of themselves more as individuals who go through life together but are more independent. For them, keeping partially or wholly separated finances can work. Personally, I hated tallying up bills when I lived in a co-op house. I found the spreadsheet super annoying. As soon as Becca and I moved into our own place, well before we decided to get married, we opened a joint checking account. We each kept our original accounts as well. When either of us would go to the grocery store or otherwise spend money on house stuff, we’d use the debit card from our joint account.

Meghan: See, that seems so rational. To get uncomfortably personal for a second, I’ve never been able to wrap my head around that. Sharing finances. I’ve never been comfortable with the idea of using someone else’s money as my own. What’s wrong with me? Am I just insanely selfish?

Zach: I’m sure that’s not why! Tell me more about what you are worried about.

Meghan: This has taken an alarming turn, sorry -

Zach: If it isn’t too personal for you, it surely isn’t for me.

Meghan: I think a lot of it has to do with power? Maybe? I hate the idea that I could feel beholden to someone, or that I could be seen as entitled. I just have this knee-jerk reaction of, “But it’s not mine. I didn’t earn it. I don’t deserve it.” Does that make sense?

Zach: Totally! A lot of our lives are spent learning to keep score. For some people, it is an amazing release to eventually stop keeping score. But it takes time, and works best if it happens gradually. Or, not at all! It’s fine not have shared finances. In fact, if a couple tried it before they have done enough trust building, it will usually cause more trouble than it will create connection.

Meghan: So for people who are alone and bereft like me, is there work you can do to prepare for being in a couple and being more open about money and spending? Even if you never decide to share finances across the board?

Zach: Absolutely. We might have to cut this next analogy…There are some parallels to sex here.

Meghan: Oh, no, this is perfect.

Zach: Being a good sex partner requires having some sense of what your own needs are and experience with meeting them. It’s really the same with money. The more a person gets to know themselves financially, the better shape they are in for talking about and working with someone else on it. Paying attention to what felt good and what felt shitty helps each of us know what works for us and what doesn’t. Knowing how we react emotionally to different situations is very important. The more you know yourself and your needs, the better a financial relationship will work. We get to know ourselves by paying attention and identifying patterns. The more self-aware we are, the better we can know and communicate our needs.

Now I think I am sort of rambling.

Meghan: No, I suddenly totally understand money.

Zach: Do you ever listen to Dan Savage?

Meghan: Religiously.

Zach: I think part of his shtick applies here. He encourages us all to be GGG: good, giving, and game. I sorta think it’s the same with being a good financial partner as it is with being a good sex partner. Think ‘good in bed,’ ‘giving equal time and equal pleasure,’ and ‘game for anything—within reason. Or, in financial terms: Good at communicating, giving the benefit of the doubt to your partner’s decisions, and game for anything—within reason.

I should probably tighten up the definition.

Meghan: That’s great. I think Dan would be proud.

So, for the poor souls who don’t get to meet with you in person, do you have a Top 3 list – 3 practical, concrete things that couples can do to better their financial relationship?

Zach: 1) The Your Partner is a Reasonable Person principle: When a partner’s position seems odd, it is usually because the couple hasn’t talked enough about specific personal experiences they have had. When it seems like our +1 is over-reacting, it is usually because we don’t know the full range of what they are reacting to. Sometimes something seemingly small really pisses one of us off. If the other is surprised, try to ask: “You seem really upset, did this remind you of something?”

Usually it did, like, “The way you just talked to Y reminds me of when my dad used to talk to X. That relationship was really mean and it makes me sad to think about it.”

The same is true for money: small things can make a big difference! Find out why they trigger such intense emotions and you’ll be most of the way to the answer.

2) Sweat the Big Stuff: Cutting out lattes is great. The strongest way to become more financially secure, though, is to focus on recurring expenses, especially big ones. When we got rid of our cable, we started saving $60 a month (we had cheap cable). That’s more lattes than either of us drunk in a month.

3) Start: The first, hardest, and most important step to having a good financial life is starting! There is a great old joke on just this theme: “Question: How many therapists does it take to screw in a light bulb? Answer: One, but the light bulb has to want to change.” It’s exactly the same with money. Both people have to want to change their financial life or it isn’t going to work. It is critical to have open communication and shared values. It is good to start small.

Bonus tip: Have a Vision: Starting is the hardest part, but sticking to the plan can also be hard. It is hard to save up for the sake of saving up. It is much easier to avoid buying a new pair of pants or whatever if the thing in the future is tangible, like a trip to Vietnam, moving to a place that doesn’t have roaches, or something else super awesome!

Meghan: Like super awesome pants! Those are incredible. Thank you so so so much for talking to me, even in a hurricane!

Zach: My pleasure. I had a ton of fun.

Meghan: Me too! Say hi to Becca. Stay dry.

Zach: You too!

(Postscript: We did. We were very lucky.)

Meghan Nesmith hangs out in Brooklyn and on Twitter.

I was 23 and living in a rundown second-floor studio in Bellingham, Wash. when I sleepwalked out a window.

A converted hotel room, the studio featured south-facing windows stretching from waist-level to about 10 feet high all across the far wall—a wide fixed picture framed by two casements. Opposite the radiator, French doors opened to a shallow closet in the east wall, so I’d installed a Murphy bed.

I’d leave the westernmost window open at night, and when the radiator cooled, I’d wake to shut it. I could close the easternmost window by pulling on the latch or, if I didn’t want to get up, the stay, but its sister stuck in a couple places. I had to stand on the sill and jerk at the top until it came loose. For a year, this was my routine. And then I started sleepwalking.

Sleepwalking is not about control. You can care and kill yourself with anxiety or you can relax, do what you can (more rest, less stress, fewer drinks), and ride it out. If you can go at any moment, why not have it be in your sleep?

The exciting bit is waking up:

1. I woke on the couch in the building’s rear apartment, a half-floor below my own—one that was accessible only by fire escape.

2. I woke next to a re-sealable but empty package of Hormel pepperoni, pepperoni that was not in the apartment when I went to sleep.

3. I woke in the living room at my parents’ place, downstairs from the guestroom, half-covered by a towel.

4. I crashed on a buddy’s couch and woke standing above his bed, dick in hand, as he and his girlfriend begged me to use the bathroom across the hall.

And then I woke in my underwear on State Street, right below my window, between a sidewalk sapling and a “No Parking” sign. At first, only head trauma was obvious. I wondered if I’d been been mugged. (For my clothing?) I re-entered the building and pounded on my apartment door until a Warcraft-loving night owl opened up across the hall:

“It’s 5 a.m.”

“Sorry. My friend is inside.”

“You’re bleeding.”

“I woke outside. The door was propped. Did you prop the door?”

“Your friend won’t let you in?”

“No, I’m in. I got in. I’m here.”

“I’m calling 911.”

“I’m gonna lay down. Here.”

An MRI and friendly reconnaissance filled in the rest: My tailbone struck (and bent) a metal support of the canvas awning below my window. Gravity met said resistance at dead center, dusting half my T12 as I pitched forward and fell to the street, my back broken before I’d ever hit concrete. Scans of my middle appeared normal from the front or back, but from the side, my vertebrae looked like a wedge, a cursor pointing toward my belly button.

The landlord called when I was in the hospital. He’d spoken with my neighbor and asked to enter the apartment. Percocet and valium had me in a permissive mood:

“You fell out the window?”

“Yeah it sticks in the stay and frame at the top so you gotta stand on the sill to pull it shut. We’re thinking the rod tripped me or somethi-”

“The walls are all painted red. And there are beer cans…”

“I didn’t jump.”

Surgeons at the hospital made shallow Ss with their hands. My spine now curved forward a little. It wasn’t imperative that they operate, and operations are always risky, especially spinal procedures: “Why don’t we see how things go?” So I left the hospital pretty much as I’d entered it–with a doorstop for a vertebrae–but in a molded, full-torso back brace.

When I returned, the casement stay worked beautifully. There was no proof it hadn’t always worked beautifully. My dad and friends packed my things as I watched and I moved home so my mom, an RN, could oversee my recovery. I slept on my back in their den for six weeks, with the cats perched on my brace, purring into my face.

I’ve seen how things go for 9 years now, and things have gone such that I need surgery. The problem is, my primary employer doesn’t offer benefits. The job perks are a modest annual bonus, an invitation plus-one to the holiday party, and a paycheck every other Wednesday. I work from home, a perk and curse hand-in-hand. At my side gig, I’m a part-timer; I don’t qualify for benefits.

So I’ve had a good look around. Of everything I’d seen, the health plan offered by my girlfriend’s employer was the most comprehensive and affordable, but I couldn’t get coverage as her boyfriend. A domestic partnership was our idea for a work-around. Yes, “our.” The $35 registration fee was mine.

Ours is a domestic partnership of convenience, a commitment that changed in name only. Marriage is the serious step. The difference, in our case, is simple: We didn’t exchange vows before any loved ones or deities. We were half-hitched in May by a clerk named Rianuldo.

But that’s underselling the process. There were traces of romance. She didn’t pause before signing the form, an indication, I thought, of trust or readiness or—I wasn’t sure. Or I was: I was sure she was sure. She’s too good to be that good an actor. She asked, “Have you seen any celebrities in here?” and Rianuldo said yes, Eli Manning, and her face lit with recognition. All Indiana girls know the name Manning, that a Manning is a Big Deal.

Without my glasses, I lost sight of the ceiling. Light poured in from everywhere. I counted grandads in their good shoes, newlyweds at their beaming, dieted-down best. A flash went off every few seconds. Puerto Rican flower girls toddled through wedding parties and exploded with tears like tiny lace novae. All that hope packed into one hall had a soaring, dizzying effect.

It wasn’t until later, as I quizzed her (Eli plays for… “The Yankees?”), that I realized I hadn’t paused either. I’d signed a legal commitment with zero hesitation. Implicitly, we’d said something like “I might marry (a less broken) you,” or even, “I will marry you,” but not yet “will you marry me.”

Not that we gave it that much thought. We’re in love, happy, all that. If we break up, it’s as easy to dissolve a domestic partnership as it is to buy one. There’s a form online, a $27 fee. Efficient exes can bypass both fee and form by marrying someone else.

The certificate Rianuldo gave us did not guarantee me health coverage. Her provider asked to see our lease, tax returns (or government-issued IDs with matching addresses), proof of a joint bank account, and utility bills in each name. They also sent a Declaration of Cohabitation & Financial Interdependence for us to sign and notarize under a key phrase:

“We, the undersigned domestic partners, being duly sworn, depose and declare that we have been living together on a continuous basis for at least six (6) months and we are financially interdependent.”

I was approved a few days short of Sept. 30, the end of the annual enrollment period. Coverage was retroactive to Sept. 1, immediately deflecting some $17,000 in hospital bills.

I maintain my $35 investment with a $325 monthly premium—her employer contributes a little, and we split the rest. There’s also the welcome burden of relationship maintenance, none of which is new. I do the dishes when she cooks. I run errands in the dark and cold. To varying degrees of success, I communicate.

In New York, a domestic partnership grants many benefits of marriage with a few crucial exceptions: There are no income tax advantages, spousal communication privileges, or inheritance rights. You also can’t say you’re married. “Wife” isn’t true. I’m not the type for “partner.” Girlfriend works for now.

The lone difference in our relationship is that a serious accident won’t leave me in serious debt. Even better, if I die, she’s not yet saddled with my hardcore records. (The number of cassettes I own may hold off marriage indefinitely.) It’s a good place for us both.

My mom is in a different place entirely. The day after I told her, she emailed:

“Since our conversation, I’ve stopped wearing Gma/Gpa’s engagement ring. Let me know if you want me to send it to you…”

The day after that:

“It’s tucked away someplace safe, and you just let me know…”

And so on. No pressure.

So while I’ve compartmentalized marriage and domestic partnership, the divide is harder to navigate with others. When we visited her family in Indiana this past Thanksgiving, I stayed in the basement. She slept two floors away. Her parents know about our situation, and they’re sympathetic, but they’re traditional. The message was clear.

The basement is finished and well-appointed, the bulk of it dedicated to a sprawling rec room. There’s a full kitchen. A wrap-around couch faces a cinema-sized flatscreen. Behind the couch, a pool table, used not once in two decades, and a ping-pong table, its Masonite pocked in four even patches.

I was working in the rec room just before we left when her father came downstairs. He was headed back to work. An ortho himself, he passed along the names of some surgeons in NYC, and we hugged or shook hands—a make-or-break choice so fast and awkward, panic blurs the memory—and said goodbye.

I’d had an impulse, should we find ourselves alone, to express my intent. To establish my domestic partnership with his daughter was an end-run and not endgame, that I loved her and intended, someday, to come and ask for her hand. But not today. Someday. And certainly not “her hand.” I wasn’t sure how to phrase it.

“Thanks for coming. It’s always nice having you here.”

“Thanks for having me.”

“Call those specialists. Someone will take your insurance.”

“I called a f—I hope so. Thank you.”

Was the mention of insurance a cue? There was a pause, as there is at the end of any conversation, and I should’ve said, “You know…” But I hadn’t planned each word. I put my hand on the pool table. We half-smiled and parted.

I can blame head trauma or my state-school education, but the truth is I’m just a nervous guy. I’m no good on my feet. I botch words so consistently, it sounds like I’m making them up. And the Obama-”uh”s and Dubya-flubs strike hardest when I’ve got something I really want to say, something I have to get right. It’s fear. If and when I ask for his blessing, I’ll need a stack of index cards. And that’s embarrassing.

Doubly so: Marriage and domestic partnership are separate in my mind, but obviously connected somewhere else—I’d romanticized the speed of her signature. Any pressure to level with him had come from inside. I am so not cool.

Still, I can’t recommend The City Clerk’s office enough. It’s the best attraction in the city. There are no tourists, no suggested donations. Singles are welcome—go window shop for your next relationship status. Go for the chill vibes. Marriage is no longer a privilege in New York, so it’s open season, a big, blissed-out party.

And if you’re lucky enough to find a mutual investor, couples’ rights are now a fun commodity. You just go downtown and pick which ones you’d like. Domestic partnerships cost the same as marriage licenses. Ceremonies are an extra $25. The wait’s about an hour, so grab a bench. Bring a sandwich. The whole thing will cost less than dinner.

Michael Dempster is from Tacoma.

First of all, let’s get this out of the way—every divorce is its own deep-sea fissure, blooming with its own lantern-eyed fish and worm-plant things and vampire squids and whatever, and they can only live in that one place. We won’t pretend that the things that grew in my own parents’ divorce grow in all of them.

My own experience as a kid of parents who got divorced when I was 4 was a sort of blossoming cynical mercantilism, and I found myself growing a budding sense that every exchange has a dollar value, and everything has to be evened up. It’s a bit of a cliche that divorced parents can use their kid as a trophy, and I don’t want to make it sound like mine were explicitly challenging me to pick one to love more. But the reality is that my mom was wealthier than my dad, and that made visiting her on weekends like traveling to a wealthy friend’s house. 

I was too young to know a ton about money. I know we had a single family house with a step-down living room, and there was a play room just for me and toys. I think my parents basically made the same amount of money—my dad working for the county, my mom rising into management at a government contractor. Maybe not, though. But once they divorced and their finances were no longer mingled, their financial experiences diverged, as my mom moved up in the org chart faster while my dad was slowly shifting between fields, from construction to tech startups.

My dad was on the low end of wealthy (“upper middle class” if you’d like, although probably “lower upper class” is better). This may or may not be related to the decision my parents made to give him primary custody, with bi-weekly visits to my mom’s on weekends. He made enough that my stepmom could work from home and help get me to and from daycare and school. But he moved out of the house he and my mom had shared, and into a smaller townhouse in the same neighborhood (chosen so it’d keep me in my elementary school), and still lives there now.

My mom, on the other hand, was in a small apartment when she first got divorced, then upgraded to a bigger house nearby, then a huge one. (A pretty good example of The Sims theory of economic mobility.) As I grew older, she would go on more and more fancy vacations and cruises, she would buy nicer furniture and homes, and I would become more aware of how everything I did cost my parents money.

So I found myself learning to do things like guesstimate what a Christmas gift cost, and make sure I only told opposing parents about enough gifts to roughly balance out what they’d gotten me. I learned to play down the fanciness of meals I had with mom when talking to my dad, or to laugh at how stuffy they were, while at the same time playing up nice dinners out with my dad when talking to my mom.

Vacations were minefields—my mom would take me to San Francisco, to London, to St. Lucia, while my dad’s were to beach towns and family friends in upstate New York. I should be clear—at no point did anyone ever mention dollar costs or “showing off” or anything of the sort. But when you are telling one parent what the other does, protective instincts kick in. You want to make everything as smooth as possible.

This wasn’t always easy. My mom got us tickets to see Cal Ripken’s last game as an Oriole, and my dad was extremely unhappy that she got to have that moment with me. I can’t blame him, really, since baseball is and was his thing, and the Orioles were his team, and Ripken’s last game was a once in a lifetime (literally!) event—so I just didn’t talk to him about it. (I also tried not to wear my Ripken ball cap around him for a few months after.)

And sometimes there were things that I just wanted to turn down. My mom invited me to go to an all-inclusive resort in the Caribbean, and I spent weeks trying to figure out if there was a way to avoid it, because I didn’t want to have to tell my dad about it, or think about how much money it cost her, or basically engage in any way with the economic realities of vacations. I ended up going, of course, and I had a great time in an “all-you-can-drink bar” sort of way, but it was also something that made me confront how much I don’t like owing my parents.

Now that I’m 26, this sense that everything has a dollar value means that I’d rather be the person buying people drinks than the one receiving them. I have an estimate for how much, in dollars, I should get for every holiday gift from every member of my family, and I try to match up what I spend on their gifts too. It means I didn’t want my family paying for any of my wedding, because letting them pay meant giving them an emotional foothold in the experience. It means I still try to distract them from giving me out-of-season gifts, because I’d rather not have that deep-down-in-my-gut sense of unbalanced debt, even if it means getting a nice pair of sunglasses.

Most of it all, it means that I am extremely aware of what even marginal changes in income and socio-economic class can do. Slipping upstairs to the top 5 percent of household income every other weekend made me realize that lifestyles weren’t just things that you get because you earn them, they’re things you have to pay for. Everything has a cost.

The author writes sometimes, but not much, and remains divorce-phobic to this day, even with 3000 miles of distance between him and his parents.

Lisa and Bryan are moving in together and, against everyone’s better judgment, are documenting it on the internet. I’m mediating so it isn’t totally them just publishing their personal emails to each other—they’re publishing their personal emails to ME. Lisa’s terrible with money and Bryan is great with money. They are shooting for a February move-in date, but first they have to find a place.

TO: LISA AND BRYAN
FROM: LOGAN
SUBJECT: (no subject)

Are you guys still moving in together or have you come to your senses? Also how did you make this decision in the first place?

TO: LOGAN
FROM: LISA
SUBJECT: Re: (no subject)

Bryan and I first decided to live together one very drunken night in August when our relationship was a very mature four months old. At a wedding after party in San Luis Obispo after countless bottles of wine, a few glasses of scotch and a shameful amount of Jagermeister shots, Bryan asked me to move in. Knowing it was too soon, I told him I was not about to move in with someone unless I knew were … ya know… moving forward in the relationship at some point. He said, “Are you talking about marriage? Oh, don’t worry, I’m going to marry you.” After hours of watching bridesmaids walk down the aisle and father-daughter dancing, that was all it took for me. 

Over the next few days we started discussing the details—the wheres and whats and hows. We came up with a dream apartment with a dream price tag:
2 bedrooms
2 bathrooms
Hardwood floors
Central Air
Dishwasher
Laundry in the unit
Some sort of yard and/or patio
A stable for the pony I’m going to get

And we decided all that was fairly worth about $2000/month. Assuming we’d split that evenly, that seemed doable to me. I am currently paying about $800/month to live in a spacious 3-bedroom in West Hollywood, with roommates. What’s a couple hundred more a month? Especially for all those amenities. Done and done.

That was… until we started looking. By the looks of Craigslist and some other website rental agencies, we might have been aiming a bit too high. We live in Los Angeles. Sure, there are neighborhoods where a $2000 2-bedroom exists, but I’m not willing to start carrying a gun to get the mail (or live in the valley). And that’s when the financial shame spiral hit.

I remembered—for the first time in this process—that I am in debt and moving costs money. The last month’s rent, the security deposit, the movers. Where is that money going to come from?? It started seeming really irresponsible to throw away an extra $2,400 a year. That’s $2,400 that could go toward that debt. $2,400 that could go to a few weekend getaways a year. $2,400 for all that pony maintenance.

And thus started my semi-annual financial breakdown. What fantastic timing! You know, that time every few months when I realize I need to be making at least $200,000 a year to live the life I want to live (and am irresponsibly already living). Luckily, this time when my mind started spinning to the point of nausea, I was able to turn to my friend, partner, and future roommate, Bryan, to help me off the ledge.

I’m really lucky that even though Bryan doesn’t have my financial woes, he’s still able to sympathize with money freakouts. He agreed that there is no reason for us to spend more than we’re paying now. We decided to downsize our expectations. We can live in one bedroom, right? We can deal with doing our laundry in some communal space like we do now. We can get more window fans and do dishes by hand if need be. We can let the pony sleep in the bathtub.

We’re now looking for something in the $1600-$1800 range. We’re not looking in my neighborhood, which, unless you get in to a rent controlled place like mine, is pretty pricey. Our dream home is looking less like a fantasy, but we’ll both be there, right? So how can it be bad? LOVE MAKES PEOPLE SETTLE FOR LESSER THINGS!!

Plus, at a one-year-old’s birthday party this weekend Bryan promised to build me a house some day. Other people’s momentous events make him really romantic and generous. I can’t wait to go to our first funeral together.

TO: LISA
FROM: LOGAN
SUBJECT: Re: Re: (no subject)

“Oh don’t worry, I’m going to marry you” !?!??!?!?!
That’s not real life. That’s movie dialogue. I’m very proud of you for putting off moving in together immediately. Nobody is sane in the first few months of a relationship, and I’m glad you recognized it.

TO: LOGAN
FROM: LISA
SUBJECT: DEALBREAKER!?!?!?!?!?

Today I was in traffic for 80 minutes. It usually takes 20 to get to work. I finally got to the intersection where the problem was stemming—it was a huge water main break at the corner of Bryan’s block. So my first instinct was to call Bryan and tell him so he could take another route. And what did he say? “Oh, I saw it when I walked out my apartment so I took the freeway” AND YOU DIDN’T THINK TO TELL ME???????????????

So I realize we need to budget for an larger couch for him to sleep on some nights.

TO: LISA
FROM: LOGAN
SUBJECT: Re: DEALBREAKER!?!?!?!?!?

You didn’t CC Bryan on this, I noticed.

TO: LOGAN
FROM: LISA
SUBJECT: Re: Re: DEALBREAKER!?!?!?!?!?

No I can’t wait until it goes up and he sees how mad I am at him.

TO: LISA
FROM:LOGAN
SUBJECT:  Re: Re: Re: DEALBREAKER!?!?!?!?!?

Oh jesus christ this experiment is already going awry. Forward this to your boyfriend before it goes on the internet.

TO: LOGAN
FROM: BRYAN

Lisa and I can be easily distracted by marathons of R. Kelly’s Trapped in the Closet, so knowing we needed something to write about forced us to start having the conversations we needed to have—well, that and Lisa’s semi-annual financial breakdown.

I admit I did ask Lisa to move in while under the influence of a few adult beverages, but love was in the air, we were at a wedding for God’s sake. They say drunk words are sober truths and that is definitely the case here. I had been thinking about asking Lisa to move in with me for a little while, but I knew it was quick and was afraid that it would scare her, so it took a little liquid courage to actually ask.

As Lisa mentioned, we had our first big discussion, which was about managing expectations. I have been thinking about moving into a bigger place for a while now but haven’t because I didn’t want to increase my monthly expenses. All of sudden when we started talking about moving in together I was all for spending more a month, the opposite of what I thought would happen if I ever lived with someone.

When we talked, we realized that while a few hundred more a month than we pay now doesn’t seem like a lot, that money could easily pay for vacations (I am currently working on taking Lisa to Paris next year – shhhhhh….), etc. An extra bedroom would be nice but sacrificing travel and fun for a room that will be empty most of the time doesn’t make sense. We’re going to have to compromise on a few things from our wish list, like making the pony sleep in the bathtub, but we will get those things as we move into better places over the years.

We also talked about the upfront costs that come with moving. First and last months’ rent, security, movers, etc. (Aren’t we too old to ask our friends to help us move?) That all adds up quickly. Lisa is concerned about where the money to cover these costs will come from. Fortunately, I’m currently in a financial situation that would allow me to cover most of the moving costs. I was hesitant though, to offer to take care of these costs because Lisa and I are both independent people, and it has taken awhile for her to accept me just paying for dinner when we go out. I made the offer and as expected Lisa declined—she indeed wants to contribute evenly.

This has been the hardest part for me because I respect Lisa and her wanting this to be an even partnership, but I was also raised watching my father provide for my family and me and I just want to do the same. I know money’s tighter for her than me right now, and I’d rather her not put herself in more debt to cover these costs when I have the ability to help. While she feels like me paying for these costs indebts her to me, I disagree—these are cost for starting our life together so these costs are ours. I feel like the money should come from wherever it is available. I foresee a lot more conversations on the topic in the future. We look forward to telling you all about them!

P.S. About the couch…we are not buying a new couch. We have discussed the things we’ll have to buy for the new place and replacing a perfectly good couch is not on that list! Besides, that couch is plenty big and comfortable enough for Lisa me to sleep on.

My husband and I recently spent a few weeks in my hometown, and while walking around a lake—there are many there, and it was a daily activity—with one of my childhood friends, she asked us a question she said she’s been asking a lot of couples she knows: “When did you start to feel like a family?”

I’d thought about this before. I think the first time I ever explicitly referred to the two of us as family was during my wedding vows, and it was probably after our wedding that we started explicitly claiming ourselves as such. But getting married didn’t really change anything in our relationship. We had been living together for three years by then and had almost entirely combined our lives. In fact we’ve often joked that the only things to change after our wedding were our tax filing status and my last name.

I had considered us a family for at least a few years before then, I suppose, but it wasn’t until my friend asked the question that I really pinpointed when that happened: It was when we combined our finances. We did it around the time we moved in together, three years before our wedding. I hadn’t realized what an important role money had played in the creation of our identity as a family unit, but the more I thought about it, the clearer it became. 

We combined finances partially out of convenience. I was finishing my first year of graduate school, my husband (boyfriend, at the time) was graduating from college, and we were getting our first apartment together. We were almost two years into our relationship, meaning two years into the complicated systems couples use to pay for things—splitting the tab for groceries (more difficult than it sounds, considering we spent almost every night together but he still lived in the dorms and ate in dining halls half of the time, and I had an apartment where we cooked); playing the “you paid for dinner last time, I’ll pay this time” game; and constantly trying to figure out which one of us owed the other money.

It was confusing, and frustrating, and we constantly knew one of us was getting the short end of the financial stick. And it was only going to get worse, since we’d soon be sharing rent and utilities and furniture and trips to Target and everything else that comes with living together. We knew we were together for the long-run and had already talked about our assumptions that we’d get married. So we decided that it was time to get a joint bank account.

But in discussing what kind of system we should use to share money, a decision to open a joint bank account quickly turned into a decision to almost entirely merge our finances. I’m not entirely sure what took us from “let’s contribute the same amount each month into this shared account and use it to pay shared bills” into “what’s yours is mine, mine is yours,” but that’s basically where we ended up. Maybe it was because we both knew that it was a good step toward a decision to get married. It would help us get to know each other’s spending habits and ideas about saving and financial planning. And we knew that if we did get married we’d want entirely mingled finances, so maybe we thought it’d be easier if we just skipped all the intermediary steps along the way. Or maybe it just seemed easier.

I remember my dad and stepmom, finances separated, arguing at the grocery store over who should pay for the ice cream that my step-mom didn’t like, or why there were tampons on the checkout belt, or whose shampoo cost more. Splitting money for them was a constant battle, and while we knew it wasn’t that way for every couple, we also knew it wasn’t what we wanted.

So a good couple of years before we were engaged, our financial lives became almost completely shared. It helped that neither of us had much to our name—there wasn’t much worry about one of us stealing away with the other’s money. But even if one of us had been blessed with more money in the bank, I think we would have done it anyway. The arrangement was about trust and openness, about long-term timelines, and about combining our lives into a partnership.

Here’s what all of this looked like (and continued to look like up until four months ago, when we left our jobs to travel full-time for a year): We opened a joint checking account, a joint savings account (which we immediately split into savings sub-accounts for travel, education, and general savings), and two joint credit cards. Our paychecks went into our joint account. Once or twice each month, each savings account received an automatic transfer of money from the checking account.

We each retained the personal bank accounts we had before the merge.  Birthday gifts and academic awards also went into our personal accounts, and each month we each received an automatic transfer from our joint checking account. Our personal accounts were ours to do with as we liked, with no oversight from the other person. (I suppose I would oversight the heck out of it if he decided to start using it to buy meth, or something like that, but pretty much anything else is fine and not really any of my business.) Up until we left our jobs this summer, he made significantly more than I did, so his personal account received more money than mine did (at my suggestion).

At the point when we merged everything, our only debts were my college and graduate school loans (I say “only” as though they weren’t significant —HA!) and plans for a joint car loan.  We considered all of this a part of our shared financial life, and payments for my loans started coming out of our joint account. At the time, he didn’t have any educational debt but was pretty sure he’d want to go back to graduate school eventually, so we figured our school debts might eventually even out. Or maybe they wouldn’t, but that would be okay.

After we set up the system, we vaguely determined guidelines for how money out of our joint accounts could be spent. There’s a lot of gray area here, for things like tampons or foods that only one of us likes, but for the most part we use the joint account unless it’s pretty clearly a personal purchase. I’m deathly allergic to nuts, for example, but my husband can certainly buy a container of almonds at the grocery store using our shared money, since it’s a pretty normal grocery-type purchase. If he started spending thousands of our joint account dollars on almonds, we’d have a problem, but if he saved up his personal spending money for months and then spent it all on almonds, that would be his prerogative. We try to distinguish between clothing items that are really needed (socks, underwear, work clothing, running shoes, etc.), which are purchased out of the joint account, and those that are more superfluous, which we each purchase ourselves. When one of us has picked up a new hobby or activity, we’ve just kind of done things however it seems reasonable—some things purchased personally, some jointly.

Putting this whole system and ethos in place required conversations about spending habits and saving and debt and all kinds of financial issues, both day-to-day and long-term. We didn’t start our collective finances with any sort of specific budgets or timelines, and I think that’s part of what made this move so momentous in the self-definition of our relationship. It required that we have trust and understanding for each other in order for it to all work, and it required that we share intimate details about how we live our lives. We don’t tell each other how much we can spend on things, but we entered into all of this with a commitment to be respectful, honest, and reasonable in our spending habits. We each have weaknesses in our spending habits and have experienced ups and downs in our incomes, but by sharing our finances we agreed that each other’s gains and losses and risks and goals would be shared.

Last year I gradually quit my professional job and started teaching cooking classes and doing some small catering jobs, a move that drastically decreased my income but made me infinitely happier and helped me start a new potential career. At the end of this year of travel, my husband will start graduate school, a huge decrease in income from what he was making before. These are momentous decisions, financially and otherwise, and we talked over them at length.

I known it can feel limiting for some people to have someone else involved in their spending decisions, but it works well for us. We each have our personal money to spend without oversight, but I actually kind of like having someone else to check in with about my spending. It can help me keep it in check when I’m tempted to buy something I’d end up regretting later. More importantly, this sort of coordination is part of what it means to be a family.  Our ability to make all kinds of decisions together, not just financial ones, is part of why our relationship works so well and why we started feeling like a family when we did.

When my friend asked me about families, she mentioned that many couples have pointed to marriage, children, or some other significant event as the moment they first felt like a family. Financial decisions are a major part of every person’s and every couple’s life plan, and making those decisions together with your partner can be a momentous experience—just like the decision to get married or to have a child.

I grew up in an environment in which money (mainly the lack thereof) was a constant and negative presence, and my struggle to build my own financial narrative was a powerfully shaping force in my late teens and early twenties. My husband was the first person to see both the everyday details and the larger picture of my financial life, and that created a type of relationship I had never before experienced. Looking back on all of this has even helped me now, as we navigate an entirely new financial world of travel and graduate school and new careers and plans to have children. If we can continue to make decisions with the same sort of trust and optimism in which we merged our finances, our family will be just fine.