Pandemic Dating 1/

I’ve been thinking a lot about wealth lately. Not figurative wealth. You can’t deposit healthy bodies or loving family structures into a checking account. I mean actual bottom-line figures.

In particular, I’ve been examining my own attitude toward money, especially its connection to my position of privilege. My parents, who immigrated to the US when they were teenagers and bussed tables and packed peaches into crates to put themselves through college, had achieved upward mobility through financial stability, and I’d never had to worry about money growing up. While they generously gave to the church and other organizations, they were also deeply practical and frugal, often using and saving items well past their shelf lives.

In my twenties, my relationship with money was more erratic—I’d work a couple of years, save up, blow a bunch of it on travel, then repeat the cycle. I still occasionally spend money on trivial things, most recently a striped gondolier dog costume that I have zero regrets about, but more and more, I’m shifting toward the philosophy that money, like knowledge and experience, is a resource that is meant to be shared with community. I’ve been asking myself questions that I still don’t have concrete answers for: As an outside gentrifier, how do I best invest in my neighborhood? In what meaningful and sustainable ways can I leverage my income to lift up those who have been traditionally barred from gaining generational wealth? Should I prioritize partnering with well-established global non-profits that have proven their efficacy or smaller grassroots ones that may have a better pulse on what an area needs?

I’d also solicited a few of my friends for their perspectives on money and dating. One told me that it hadn’t been uncommon for her to bring up student loans on first dates, each party deciding what level of debt they could handle tethering themselves to. Another friend, whose salary is two to three times mine, said that she wouldn’t mind if her partner earned a lot less than her, but that he had to have a job that she personally believed to have value. One expressed that he would be wary of dating someone who had significantly more money than him because he had seen that lead to unequal power in a relationship. All of these seemed like reasonable points of views, but what resonated with me most was the advice that it was much more important to find someone who had the same belief about the purpose of money than it was for him to have a bank account number that was equal to mine.

A few days ago, I went out with a man who had a gentle, even voice. He was shorter than what he had listed on his profile and wore beaded bracelets, though neither of these bothered me much. His bio mentioned that he was a “former investor” and that he had graduated from Penn, but his photos didn’t boast of flashy material goods and he didn’t have the smarmy sheen of a Finance Bro trying to bullshit me.

On our date, he shared a lot of things that initially sounded appealing, but left me feeling uneasy once the words settled. It was like biting into a juicy ripe fruit before realizing there were wormholes. For example, he told me that he thought he would like me even before we met and so he had made reservations at Giulia’s for after our walk. (Who takes a person with whom he’d exchanged only a small handful of messages on such an expensive first date? I steered us toward lattes and cookies instead.)

The way that he described his childhood did not lead me to conclude that he came from family money. But somehow this man who was in his 30s and had left his last job 7 years ago was now spending his time learning Spanish from a tutor and brushing up on his tennis game with a private coach while living in Newton. (“He probably did some gross things,” a friend speculated when I explained his curious situation. She had also gone to Penn and was all too familiar with Wharton students who made 6 figures straight out of college. She knew that some of them engaged in unscrupulous practices to gain their assets, specifically in the years leading up to the 2008 recession. I didn’t want to believe that this man had participated in anything that untoward, though I’m not really keen on the idea of any person amassing that much fortune in such a short period of time, whatever the methods are.)

Pre-pandemic, he had spent weeks renting a home in Italy, jet-setting all over the country. He recalled a time his buddy flew a woman he had just met to his cabin for a 24 hour trip. When I asked what his plans were for the next day, he said he would be making lunch at a friend’s house that had its own outdoor pizza oven. (Who were these people he surrounded himself with? Their lifestyles seemed like something straight out of a Goop article.)

Most striking of all, he had recently and somewhat impulsively bought hundreds of acres of land that he now wanted to turn into a wellness center. The property was located adjacent to El Yunque National Forest in Puerto Rico, and the vistas were absolutely stunning. He proudly admitted that he had only seen 1% of the land before putting in an offer. (What kind of approach to money did he have that allowed him to drop that much cash at the drop of a hat? From our conversation, it didn’t sound like he had considered the ways his substantial means impacted his new community, never mind the question of whether or not an individual should even be able to claim ownership over waterfalls and rivers and control who has access to their beauty. And while I didn’t picture him to be some cartoon movie villain who was planning to bulldoze over the rainforest, an American purchasing and determining the future of another territory is a distinctly colonizer narrative that is all the more upsetting when you remember that that territory is still recovering from a hugely destructive hurricane.)

He later texted and asked to see me again. I contemplated saying yes. It hadn’t been an unpleasant date. We both enjoyed the outdoors and plant-forward eating and I could tell that he really liked me. What kind of person turns down another date because the other person is too rich?

In the end, I decided that it wasn’t that he had a lot of money that bothered me. It was that he seemed to largely view his wealth as a way to further his own comfort and self-growth. After stumbling upon a piece of paradise, his natural inclination was to believe that it should belong to him.