A matter of cash

Well, apart from infidelity. Even then, there’s usually a money angle: he only slept with someone else because they said they liked him poor and arty, and she only slept with someone else because they said they were rich. I once went out with someone who would go off to work in the morning and leave a hundred dollars under the clock for me to spend that day. I never touched it and I even ran being insulted up the flagpole, but I miss it now. Can’t believe I didn’t just save them up and buy a car.

Because money matters. It’s awful that it matters. We hate ourselves for letting it matter. It is unworthy, distasteful, vulgar and depressing that it matters. But each partner always thinks they spend less and provide more than the other. As a woman, I think female nervousness lies in the fact that in a serious relationship, we are, at some stage, probably going to need to be supported. There is some sort of primal terror of having to earn money and keep everything going at the same time as being pregnant, being in hospital having babies and wandering around afterwards for up to a few years with small children.

When my husband came into hospital, two days after my second Caesarean in two years, and asked me how we were going to pay the mortgage that month, I knew that was it. It wasn’t of course. Here we still are, rowing about money and, intermittently, having a lovely time whenever we don’t have to think about it.

It has, somewhat unpleasantly, become the symbol of what keeps a relationship going. It might once have been the number of wild boars speared, or potential for fathering/mothering healthy children. Now it’s money. And I would like some please.