Felipe, on the other hand, was raised by a father who once traded a pretty nice car for a fishing pole.
Whereas thrift is my family’s state-sponsored religion, Felipe has no such reverence for frugality. If anything, he is imbued with a natural-born entrepreneur’s willingness to take risks, and is far more willing than I am to lose everything and start all over again. (Let me rephrase that: I am utterly unwilling to lose everything and start over again.) Moreover, Felipe doesn’t have any of the innate trust in financial institutions that I have. He blames this, not unreasonably, on having grown up in a country with a wildly fluctuating currency; as a child, he had learned to count by watching his mother readjust her reserves of Brazilian cruzeiros every single day for inflation. Cash, therefore, means very little to him. Savings accounts mean even less. Bank statements are nothing but “zeroes on a page” that can disappear overnight, for reasons completely out of one’s control. Therefore, Felipe explained, he would prefer to keep his wealth in gemstones, for instance, or in real estate, rather than in banks. He made it clear that he was never going to change his mind about this.
Okay, fair enough. It is what it is. That being the case, though, I did ask Felipe if he would be willing to let me handle our living expenses and manage our household accounts. I was pretty certain that the electric company would not accept monthly payment in amethysts, so we would have to work out a joint bank account, if only to handle the bills. He agreed to this idea, which was comforting.
What was even more comforting, though, was that Felipe was willing to use our months of travel together to very carefully and very respectfully-over the course of those many long bus rides-work with me on setting the terms of a prenuptial agreement. In fact, he insisted on it, just as much as I did. While this might be difficult for some readers to understand or embrace, I must ask you to please consider our situations. As a self-made and self-employed woman in a creative field, who has always earned my own living, and who has a history of financially supporting the men in my life (and who still, painfully, writes checks to my ex), this subject mattered dearly to my heart. As for Felipe, a man whose divorce had left him not only broken-hearted but also quite literally broke… well, it mattered to him, too.
I recognize that whenever prenuptial agreements are discussed in the media, it is generally because a rich older man is about to marry yet another beautiful younger woman. The topic always seems sordid, a distrustful sex-for-cash scheme. But Felipe and I were neither tycoons nor opportunists; we were just experienced enough to recognize that relationships do sometimes end, and it seemed willfully childish to pretend that such a thing could never happen to us. Anyhow, questions of money are always different when you’re getting married in middle age rather than youth. We would each be bringing to this marriage our existing individual worlds-worlds that contained careers, businesses, assets, his children, my royalties, the gemstones he had been carefully collecting for years, the retirement accounts that I had been building ever since I was a twenty-year-old diner waitress… and all these things of value needed to be considered, weighed, discussed.
While drafting a prenup might not sound like a particularly romantic way to spend the months leading up to one’s marriage, I must ask you to believe me when I say that we shared some truly tender moments during these conversations-especially those moments when we would find ourselves arguing on behalf of the other person’s best interests. That said, there were also times when this process turned uncomfortable and tense. There was a real limit to how long we could discuss the subject at all, before we would need to take a break from it, change the subject, or even spend a few hours apart. Interestingly, a couple of years later, as Felipe and I were drafting our wills together, we encountered this exact same problem-an exhaustion of the heart that kept driving us away from the table. It’s dreary work, planning for the worst. And in both cases, with both the wills and the prenup, I lost track of how many times we each uttered the phrase “God forbid.”
We stayed with the task, though, and got our prenuptial agreement written under terms that made each of us happy. Or maybe “happy” isn’t exactly the right word to use when you’re conceptualizing an emergency exit strategy for a love story that is still only at its beginning. Imagining the failure of love is a grim job, but we did it anyhow. We did it because marriage is not just a private love story but also a social and economic contract of the strictest order; if it weren’t, there wouldn’t be thousands of municipal, state, and federal laws pertaining to our matrimonial union. We did it because we knew that it’s better to set your own terms than to risk the possibility that someday down the road unsentimental strangers in a harsh courtroom might set the terms for you. Mostly, though, we pushed through the unpleasantness of these very awkward financial conversations because Felipe and I have both, over time, learned this hard fact to be incontrovertibly true: If you think it’s difficult to talk about money when you’re blissfully in love, try talking about it later, when you are disconsolate and angry and your love has died.
God forbid.
But was I delusional to hope that our love would not die?
Could I dare to even dream of that? I spent an almost embarrassing amount of time during our travels ticking off lists of everything that Felipe and I had going in our favor, collecting our merits like lucky pebbles, piling them up in my pockets, running my fingers over them nervously in a constant search for assurance. Didn’t my family and friends already love Felipe? Wasn’t that a meaningful endorsement, or even a lucky charm? Hadn’t my most wise and prescient old friend-the one woman who had warned me years earlier against marrying my first husband-completely embraced Felipe as a good match for me? Hadn’t my hammer-blunt ninety-one-year-old grandfather even liked him? (Grandpa Stanley had watched Felipe carefully all weekend the first time they met, and then finally cast his verdict: “I like you, Felipe,” he pronounced. “You seem to be a survivor. And you’d better be one, too-because this girl has burned through quite a few of ‘em already.”)
I clung to those endorsements not because I was trying to collect reassurances about Felipe, but because I was trying to collect reassurances about myself. For exactly the reason so frankly stated by Grandpa Stanley, I was the one whose romantic discrimination was not entirely trustworthy. I had a long and colorful history of making some extremely bad decisions on the subject of men. So I leaned on the opinions of others in order to prop up my own confidence about the decision I was making now.
I leaned on some other encouraging evidence, too. I knew from our two years already spent together that Felipe and I were, as a couple, what psychologists call “conflict averse.” This is shorthand for “Nobody Is Ever Going to Throw Dishes at Anyone from Across the Kitchen Table.” In fact, Felipe and I argue so infrequently that it used to worry me. Conventional wisdom has always taught that couples must argue in order to air out their grievances. But we scarcely ever argued. Did this mean we were repressing our true anger and resentment, and that one day it would all explode in our faces in a hot wave of fury and violence? It didn’t feel that way. (But of course it wouldn’t; that’s the insidious trick of repression, isn’t it?)
When I researched the topic more, though, I relaxed a bit. New research shows that some couples manage to dodge serious conflict for decades without any serious blowback. Such couples make an art form out of something called “mutually accommodating behavior”-delicately and studiously folding themselves inside out and backwards in order to avoid discord. This system, by the way, works only when both people have accommodating personalities. Needless to say, it is not a healthy marriage when one spouse is meekly compliant and the other is a domineering monster or an unrepentant harridan. But mutual meekness can make for a successful partnering strategy, if it’s what both people want. Conflict-averse couples prefer to let their grievances dissolve rather than fight over every point. From a spiritual standpoint, this idea appeals to me immensely. The Buddha taught that most problems-if only you give them enough time and space-will eventually wear themselves out. Then again, I’d been in relationships in the past where our troubles were never going to wear themselves out, not in five consecutive lifetimes, so what did I know about it? All I do know is that Felipe and I seem to get along really nicely. What I can’t tell you is why.