The last thing we take off

An essay on money, the last nakedness, and why it is harder to talk about than sex.

The couple on my screen are calm. This is not a crisis session. They have been opening their marriage slowly, over two years, and they have come to tell me about a decision they are proud of. He has a girlfriend now, with his wife’s blessing.

The girlfriend is a single mother of three, tired the way single mothers are tired, the kind of tired that has no bottom. There is never enough time, and lately there has never been enough of her left for him. So the wife had an idea. They would put her on the company payroll. A real salary, every month.

She tells me this the way you tell someone good news. She was raised on the Little Prince, she says. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.¹ She comes from a country where a man who takes a woman into his life is expected to hold her up. If the two of them were bringing this woman into theirs, then they would help carry her. Otherwise, she asks me, what is the second relationship even for?

I want to be careful, because this is her logic and not a rule for anyone else. But follow it, because it goes where most people will not.

A few weeks earlier she had told the story to a room of polyamorous mothers. They had spent the evening on the usual things, the jealousy, the calendars, who sleeps where. When it was her turn she said that she and her husband had decided to pay his girlfriend a salary, that it made her happy, that she was glad the woman was no longer drowning.

The room took a sharp breath in and did not let it out. There was a pause with weight in it, and then someone said, almost under her breath, I could never do that.

That is the moment she came to tell me about. They had talked about sex all evening and no one had blinked. It was money that emptied the room.

The taboo we have backwards

Here is what I think she walked into, because I keep walking into it too. We have the taboo backwards. We are taught that sex is the exposed thing, the dangerous secret, the part of us we keep covered. But you can take your clothes off in front of a near-stranger and give almost nothing away. Show someone what you earn, what you owe, what you are afraid to spend, who you secretly believe deserves your money, and you have handed over something far more naked than your body.

Sex is the present tense. It happens, and then it is morning. Money is the future. It is the house, the years, the old age you are quietly betting on, the truest map of what you actually love, drawn in numbers that cannot pretend otherwise. So of course the women in that room could talk all night about who sleeps with whom. That was the body. The salary was the life behind it.

The sociologist Viviana Zelizer spent her career showing that we never keep love and money apart, that we are always deciding which money is allowed to touch which love.² Marriage itself, the historian Stephanie Coontz reminds us, was an arrangement about property and survival long before it was about feeling.³ We have always loved with our money. We have just never wanted to admit it.

More people, more debt

There is something in the wife’s logic that the world she has joined does not want to hear. Polyamory sells itself as abundance. More love, more freedom, more life. She had arrived at the opposite. Every person you let in is a person you become responsible for. More partners is not more freedom. It is more debt.

This is the part people resist, and they are not wrong to. There is a whole philosophy that says you can love without owing, that the safety net is the very thing it refuses. Maybe. But let someone in, and one day the call comes at three in the morning, and you can choose how you answer it, never whether it comes. The wife had simply answered hers in advance, with a standing payment. The room found that more shocking than an affair.

What the spending proves

There is another woman I think of, working the same arithmetic from the other end. She earns more than the men she dates, and she likes them to pay anyway. Not for the meal. If he is spending on me, she says, he cannot be spending on everyone. I know where he is.⁴ She is reading money as attention. It always has been. What a person spends on you is a record of who they are not spending it on. The wife paying a salary and this woman wanting the bill are doing the same thing. They are making love legible in the one language that cannot lie about how much.

Ask about it directly and watch what happens. At those same meetups the wife had started asking a simple question, who pays on a date, and the conversation would tighten and slip away. People changed the subject, or reached for the line everyone reaches for now. We split it. Fifty-fifty. That’s the standard. Fair, modern, clean. It is also, often, the most polite place to hide.

The last nakedness

By the end of the hour I had given the couple no rule, because they did not need one. What they had, and what the room full of mothers did not, was the ability to say the number out loud. That is the whole of it. Not the salary, which is theirs and nobody else’s. The fact that they could say it.

Because the silence is not really about opening a marriage. It sits in monogamous couples too, married thirty years, who know every inch of each other and have never once said aloud what they think they are worth, or what they resent paying for, or what they would do with the money if the other one were gone. They undressed decades ago. The money has stayed dressed.

We will take our clothes off for almost anyone. The financial armour is the last thing we take off. The couples who manage it, who say the unspeakable number out loud and do not flinch, are not the ones with the most of it or the cleanest split. They are the ones who have stopped being ashamed. You can begin that long before you ever open a marriage. You may begin it and decide to open nothing at all.

Victoria Onken is a relationship coach for consensual non-monogamy and open relationships, based in Amsterdam and working online with clients across the US, UK, and Europe.

Footnotes

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince (1943). The line is the fox’s, in the Katherine Woods translation. ↩

Viviana A. Zelizer, The Purchase of Intimacy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); and The Social Meaning of Money (New York: Basic Books, 1994). ↩

Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage (New York: Viking, 2005). ↩

The reliability of an expensive signal is Amotz Zahavi‘s handicap principle: a display is trustworthy when it is too costly to fake. Amotz Zahavi, “Mate Selection: A Selection for a Handicap,” Journal of Theoretical Biology 53, no. 1 (1975): 205–214. ↩