Dear Priscilla: On Splitting the Check (And Other Ways the Heart Keeps Score)

Dear Priscilla,

I've been dating a wonderful man for four months, and things are going well, but last week we went to dinner and when the check came, he suggested we split it exactly down the middle — including the appetizer I ordered but he mostly ate. I didn't say anything, but it's been bothering me ever since. Am I overreacting? Should money talk this early in a relationship worry me?

— Uncertain in Tulsa, Oklahoma

Uncertain, sweetheart, what a lovely, ordinary little question, the kind I used to answer in ninety seconds flat back when I still believed a shared appetizer was just a shared appetizer and not a referendum on a man's soul. It reminds me — as so many things do now, I've noticed, though I try not to dwell on the pattern — of the spring of 2003, when I was engaged to a man named Desmond who trained falcons on weekends and, I would later learn, trained women the rest of the week.

Desmond and I went to dinner at a little Italian place with candles in old wine bottles, the kind of place that photographs beautifully and forgives nothing, and when the check came he did not simply suggest we split it. He produced — from an inner jacket pocket, Uncertain, like a magician revealing a dove — a folded index card on which he had, over the course of the meal, itemized every dish by percentage of consumption. I had eaten, by his calculation, sixty-two percent of the bruschetta. He had eaten none of my tiramisu, a fact he noted with visible pride, as though restraint around dessert were a form of moral superiority he intended to bill me for. He circled numbers. He circled them with a mechanical pencil he also produced from the jacket. I want you to sit with that image, Uncertain — a grown man, a man who spoke fluent Latin to birds of prey, dividing a dessert menu like it was the Treaty of Versailles.

Do not make my mistake, Uncertain. I sat there. I said nothing. I told myself it was thriftiness, that some men simply loved precision, that the falconry was a red flag I had already agreed to fly. I paid my sixty-two percent of the bruschetta and I smiled and I did not understand, not yet, that the index card was never about bruschetta. It was never about money at all. It was about a man showing me, in the gentlest, most reasonable-sounding arithmetic imaginable, exactly how much of me he was willing to account for.

I did not see Desmond again after the September he released our engagement announcement into the wild — I mean this literally, Uncertain, he tied it to the leg of his red-tailed hawk, Cornelius, and let the bird go over the Delaware River, and to this day I do not know what became of that hawk or that announcement, whether some fisherman found it, whether Cornelius is out there still, circling, unable to land because of what he carries. I think about that hawk more than I'd like to admit. I think he understands me better than most people did back then.

Now, I want to be fair to you, because your situation is so much smaller and gentler than mine ever was, and that is precisely why you must act now, while the wound is still small enough to close. A man who splits a check evenly on date twelve is not, strictly speaking, a man with an index card. But my second husband — you may not know I was married, briefly, in the winter after the falconer, to a man named Harlan who ran a artisanal casserole business out of a converted church — Harlan never once mentioned money. Not once. He paid for everything, extravagantly, for two beautiful years, and I thought, there, you see, Priscilla, you learned your lesson, this one is generous. And then one November morning I discovered that what Harlan had actually been doing, all that time, was quietly transcribing my grandmother's tuna noodle casserole recipe, the one she whispered to me on her deathbed like a family scripture, and rebranding it — laminating it, Uncertain — as the "Harlan's Heritage Bake," available at four farmers' markets and, I later found out, one airport kiosk in Newark. He didn't want my money. He wanted my inheritance, and the inheritance wasn't cash, it was a recipe, and nobody warns you that theft can smell like paprika and love at the same time.

So you see the difficulty, don't you, Uncertain? The problem was never the check. The problem is never the check. Money is just the shape the wound happens to be wearing that day. Some men itemize the bruschetta. Some men steal the casserole. Some men — and I think of my third fiancé here, though I've mostly stopped thinking of him, except when I water my ferns, which is daily — leave you at your own housewarming party in 2007 to enter a topiary competition three states away, and you find out he's engaged to the competition's other judge before you've even finished paying off the caterer. I don't tell you this to frighten you, dear. I tell you this because someone should have told me, and nobody did, and I had to learn it the way you learn where the stove is hot — with my whole hand.

Here is what I have built instead, Uncertain, and I say this not with sadness but with the quiet pride of a woman who finally stopped setting the table for guests who bring index cards. I live alone now, by design, in a home with a shallow decorative moat around the perimeter — nothing dramatic, knee-deep, more of a suggestion than a fortress, but a suggestion the mail carrier has learned to respect. I go by a different name at the pharmacy, the dry cleaner, and my book club, and I've found that a woman who answers to three names is a woman no single man can fully catalog. My closest companion is a bearded dragon named Cornelius the Second, and I chose a reptile deliberately, Uncertain, because a reptile's face does not perform warmth it doesn't feel, and there is a peace in that kind of honesty I never once found at a dinner table. I do not say this is the life for everyone. I say it is the life that stopped the bleeding.

So when your gentle Tulsa man reaches for the check next time, watch his hands, not his math. Does he reach for a calculator, or does he reach for you? If it's the calculator — even a small one, even a mental one, even just a little furrow in the brow as he divides the appetizer — you get out now, while it still only costs you the price of a shared bruschetta and not, as it cost me, a hawk, a casserole recipe, and a topiary trophy I still see referenced in that man's Christmas newsletter every December.

But Uncertain, if his hands reach for you instead — hold onto that. Hold onto that so hard. And know that whatever you decide, I am rooting for you fiercely, from my little moated house, with my reptile and my index cards long since burned. I built this life out of every mistake I made so that you would never have to make them yourself, and if you listen to me — really listen — you can be every bit as happy, and as free, and as gloriously, deliberately alone as I am.

Yours in love and vigilance, Priscilla