I’m hearing too many stories about what joblessness and money woes are doing to relationships. More wife-beating. More verbal abuse. More men saying things (to women caring for three kids at home) like, “I’m not your bail-out package, y’know.” More women saying things to men like, “I didn’t sign on for life with a jobless person.”
Nobody “signs on” for love with the idea that money will interfere, particular when it never has. Yet money, more than sex, even, puts the most pressure on love….and you have to be very careful, now, what you say to your lover. I mean it. A man, broke, is a man at his lowest in every possible way. To say anything, ANYTHING, other than, “We’ll get through this. I know you’re trying”–will be remembered forever. Even asking a jobless man, “Did you check the papers today? Did you call that firm you were going to call?” is, in my book, harassment. Yes, you’re stressed and eager and desperate….but how about, “Listen, they’d be lucky to get you. Who else knows this work better than you?”
You don’t even have to mean that, not with your whole heart. You may suspect he’s responsible for losing his job, even if he isn’t. Keep it to yourself. What earthly good is it to make him feel worse right now? Or for him to make you feel worse? It can decimate your love faster than Jove’s thunderbolt decimated a god he was jealous of.
Enlist each other in your plans. Talk as much as you can about what “we” can do to get through this. Don’t ditch each other in the name of survival. You’re in it together–so act like it. War heroes don’t ditch each other when they’re in the trenches, and you, lovers, are in the trenches. Be heroic. Help each other out. Watch each other’s back. Save each other’s lives. The money will suddenly mean far less than the purple heart you award each other when times get better.
And they will.
