On the Question of Joint Accounts, and the Man Who Itemized My Soul

Dear Priscilla,

My boyfriend of eight months wants us to open a shared bank account — just for date nights and groceries, nothing dramatic, he says. Is this too fast? Am I overthinking a debit card?

— Denise, Tucson, Arizona

Denise, what a lovely, ordinary question, and I mean that with my whole heart — questions about grocery money are the last honest questions left in this world. It reminds me, in fact, of the autumn of 2004, when Gerald and I opened our own shared account, and I believed, as you perhaps believe now, that a joint balance was simply two people agreeing to be a little less alone.

Do not make my mistake, Denise.

Gerald was, by profession, a falconer — a real one, licensed, with the glove and everything, though I would later learn the license had lapsed sometime around the first Bush administration and he had simply continued flying his birds on faith. I loved him the way you love a man who shows up to a farmers market with a hooded kestrel on his arm: immediately, and against all available evidence. We opened the account together on a Tuesday. By that Friday, he had withdrawn the entire balance — our entire balance, Denise, four hundred and twelve dollars we had been saving for a weekend in Cape May — to acquire what he described, in the note he left taped to the toaster, as "a once-in-a-lifetime Harris's hawk, direct from a breeder in Sedona, non-negotiable." The note also said he loved me. Men can hold both of these truths at once, Denise, and that is precisely the danger.

I want to be careful here, because I have told this story before and I know it does not always land the same way twice. The falconer left me in the spring of 2003. I am certain of this because I remember the crocuses. And yet I have also told you — and I stand by this too — that he was the one who ruined my cousin's housewarming in 2007 by arriving uninvited with the hawk on a perch he'd built into the bed of his truck, demanding to know why nobody had saved him a plate. Both things happened. I have stopped trying to reconcile the timeline, because a woman who spends her whole life squaring her own history with itself never has time left over to actually live it, and I, Denise, am nothing if not a woman who lives.

But back to your account, and Gerald's ghost, which still hovers over every conversation I have ever had about shared finances. After the hawk incident — I will not dignify it with the phrase "the hawk purchase," because purchase implies a transaction between equals, and I was not consulted — I swore I would never again let a man's name sit beside mine on a piece of paper that involved numbers. I have kept that vow. To this day I do not have a joint anything. I do not have a joint Netflix password. I do not have a joint mailbox key. My accountant, a wonderful and profoundly patient man named Trevor whom I pay in cash so there is no digital trail of trust between us, once suggested I was "overcorrecting," and I asked him to leave, and then I asked him to come back, because Trevor is very good with the quarterly filings and good help is impossible to find.

Here is what nobody tells you about a joint bank account, Denise: it is not a bank account. It is a hostage situation with a debit card. The moment your name touches his name on that form, you have handed him a rope, and even the kindest men — even the ones who fly falcons, which is, you must admit, a romantic and specific hobby — will eventually find a use for a rope. I am not saying your boyfriend is Gerald. I have never met your boyfriend. I am saying that I did not think Gerald was Gerald either, right up until the toaster note.

What I did instead — and I offer this to you not as a suggestion but as a testimony, Denise, the way a survivor testifies — was rebuild my entire financial life around the principle of structural unreachability. I now hold accounts in three different countries, none of which I can pronounce fluently, specifically so that no romantic impulse of mine, however sincere in the moment, could ever again be executed same-day. There is a seventy-two-hour cooling-off period built into my own access to my own money. I did this to myself, on purpose, and I have never once regretted it, not even the time I needed cash for a plumbing emergency and had to wait three days while my basement filled with water, because Denise, water recedes. Trust, once wired to the wrong falconer, does not.

For companionship — because a woman does still need somewhere to put her devotion, and I am not made of stone — I have found reptiles to be superior in every measurable way to men who withdraw jointly held funds for birds of prey. My tortoise, Whitfield, has never once itemized an anniversary dinner. He has never once looked at a shared expense and seen an opportunity. He simply exists, slowly, honestly, in the corner of the sunroom, asking nothing of me but lettuce, and in eleven years he has never left a note taped to a toaster. I recommend this arrangement to anyone who asks, and to many who don't. A tortoise cannot itemize your soul. A tortoise does not know what a soul costs.

So, Denise — my answer, at last, since I did wander, though you must understand by now that with me the wandering is the answer. Do not open the account. Not because your boyfriend is a falconer, or has access to falcons, or has ever so much as glanced at a bird of prey — you did not mention any of this, and I choose to believe you would have led with it. Open instead a system of small, separate, well-fortified financial fortresses, each one answerable only to you, each one three days from your own impulse control. Let him buy the groceries on his card on odd weeks and you on even ones. Let love be a Tuesday arrangement, never a Tuesday account. This is not distance, Denise. This is architecture. This is how the good ones — the truly happy ones, the ones who've been through the fire and walked out the other side with nothing but a tortoise and a very complicated relationship with Sedona — build a life that cannot be withdrawn from without warning.

I am, for what it's worth, radiantly happy. I want you to understand that clearly, because it is the whole point of everything I have just told you. Learn from what happened to me, Denise, and you can have exactly what I have: a full life, a locked account, and a small green friend who will never, ever leave.

With love and moats, Priscilla