If you laughed at the headline and thought “You say now; call me when you’ve been married 10 years instead of one”, congratulations, you’re the audience I’m talking to. Perhaps you think of me as that fresh-out-of-college hire who thinks he knows more than the folks who have been working at the office longer than the furniture, and that’s somewhat reasonable…but if you could indulge me for a moment, I think there might be something in here for you, too.
I think most of the issues that I’ve heard about over my lifetime about marriage can be solved by two things: being good at ‘bad math’, and being good at ‘good math’. Not all of them, certainly, but most of them.
I’ll start with ‘good math’, because it’s a bit more quantifiable. Amongst the reasons I chose to marry my wife is because I knew that the most commonly cited reason people divorce is over money. If the goal is to avoid divorce court, I knew I needed someone who is good with money – someone who is good with knowing when to spend it, when to not-spend it, and how to track both of those things. Wikipedia’s entry on Girl Math opens with the following summary: “The phrase “girl math” is an internet meme, used to describe rationalizations by young women to justify indulgent and potentially irresponsible spending habits.”
The internet meme is intended for humorous effect; I’ll readily admit that I too battle with the desire to spend money I don’t have on things I don’t need. I knew I needed a wife who shared a mindset that is a healthy balance between miserly hoarding and irresponsible overindulgence. “Good Math” is having a budget and sticking to it, it’s having two people who actively work to live within their means, and while it’s certainly not easy to say ‘no’ to unnecessary spending in a culture that almost idolizes it, it is simple.
What’s ‘bad math’, and how can one be ‘good’ at ‘bad math’, you ask? A fantastic question! ‘Bad Math’ is when both people avoid focusing on whether the scales are completely balanced. While an 88/12 split is certainly worth a conversation, my wife and I are very good at looking past a 53/47 proportion. Sometimes she pays when we go out for dinner, sometimes I do. We don’t keep score. While I always cook and she always does the laundry, if the kitchen needs cleaning (‘her’ chore) and I have the time, I just clean it. If the lawn needs mowing (‘my’ chore) and she’s home on a sunny day, she’ll just mow it. We don’t track our minutes in Excel, we just get s— done. We don’t start arguments about exactly who spent how much on groceries and whether they were ‘necessary’ or ‘optional’, we just move forward.
In our lottery-winning fantasy, we’d both love to just stay home and hire people to handle all of our needs and chores…but since we haven’t yet won that lottery, we both have a mindset of moving the whole household forward in a productive way. I appreciate the times she cleans the kitchen, and she appreciates the times I do. She appreciates the times I buy her flowers on the way home, I appreciate the snazzy outfits she sometimes buys me. We don’t keep score, because we are both ‘generally successful’ at handling the things we agree to do, to the point where neither of us has to really think about whether the other person is pulling their weight…and that is how you can be ‘good’ at ‘bad math’.
Now, certainly, there are many, many other facets to married life. I’m certain that remaining good at both ‘good math’ and ‘bad math’ becomes ten times harder when there are children involved, and I think that it’s also very easy to start turning exceptions into rules when it comes to division of labor. For what it’s worth, I think at least one thing worth considering about not-doing a chore or not-paying a bill because a spouse is willing to file it under ‘bad math’ is that, if my wife and I were to part ways, I’d have to do that chore or pay that bill, all of the time, along with the other chores and bills my wife takes care of.
Amongst the things about this blog entry that probably stands out to most readers is that I’m eight paragraphs in and I haven’t talked much about love or happiness or anything of that nature…and here’s my hot take: I think that’s a part of what makes marriages complicated. I think that our society has considered love the primary reason (if not the sole reason) to marry someone. I don’t think I’ll ever post the full story of how I made it to the altar, but one of the vows I made when I got there was that I committed to growing to love my wife, but what I truly value is her willingness to accept that particular vow and move forward with our marriage. I think that it’s wonderful when two people who are in love with each other can marry each other based on an emotional expression between each person, but if there’s anything that the past year of married life has taught me, it’s that a marriage with a foundation where two people commit to being good at both ‘good math’ and ‘bad math’ is the soil in which love can grow – the kind of love that enables two people to enthusiastically remain married, rather than the kind of love that compels people to get married.
