Ask Priscilla: On Taking Turns

Dear Priscilla,

My boyfriend and I have been together for two years, and I love him, but I'm the one who always plans our dates. I pick the restaurant, I get the tickets, I make the reservation. When I've mentioned wanting him to plan something once in a while, he says he "just isn't a planner" and that I'm better at it anyway. I don't want a parade or anything fancy — I just want to walk into a night out and not know what's coming. Is it wrong to want that?

— Denise, Erie, Pennsylvania

A lovely question, Denise. It reminds me of the autumn of 2004, when I too believed that a man could be trusted with a calendar.

His name was Wendell, and he was, by every outward measure, a planner. He had a leather folio. He had a fountain pen he used only for what he called "logistics." When we started dating, I thought I had found the rarest of creatures — a man who wanted to take the wheel, who wanted to surprise me, who wanted to carry some of the invisible labor of romance so that I, for once, could simply show up in a nice dress and be delighted. For the first several months, Wendell planned everything, and I felt, I confess, like a woman finally being cared for.

Do not make my mistake, Denise. Because what I did not understand — what I would not understand until it was far, far too late — was that Wendell was not planning our dates. He was auditing them.

It started small. A folded receipt slid across the table at the end of dinner, itemized in his own hand, my name beside a column of numbers: the shared bruschetta, half; the second glass of the house red, mine, because he'd had sparkling water "to stay sharp"; a four percent "convenience surcharge" he had personally invented and applied to me alone, for reasons he described only as "administrative." I laughed the first time. I want you to understand that, Denise — I laughed. I thought it was a bit. A funny, fastidious little bit, the kind of charming eccentricity you tell your friends about at brunch, back when I still believed in brunch.

By the spring it was a spreadsheet. He called it "The Ledger," out loud, the way other men might say "the good silverware." Every date scored on planning effort, thematic creativity, and what he termed "return on romantic investment," a phrase he used without a trace of irony while handing me a printed itinerary for our own anniversary dinner that included a line item labeled "flowers (sunk cost, no refund policy)." I want to be fair to Wendell, because I try, even now, to be fair to Wendell. He never once forgot an anniversary. He simply amortized it.

The end, when it came, came at my cousin's wedding, where he was discovered in the coat check reconciling the open bar receipts against a hand-drawn chart of who he believed had "over-consumed relative to their gift contribution." I do not know how he got access to the gift registry. I have chosen, in the years since, not to ask.

So you see, Denise, when you tell me you want a man who plans — who takes the reins, who surprises you, who relieves you of the burden of always being the one holding the folio — I understand the wanting more than you know. I wanted it too. I got it. And what I got was a man who turned a bouquet of grocery-store tulips into a receivable.

Here is what I have learned, in the years since Wendell, and since the others — since the man at the farmer's market in 2011 who turned out to already be planning a wedding, just not to me, and since the fellow I met through a birdwatching group in 2003 who left one Tuesday to pursue falconry full time and did not, as best I can piece together, actually own a bird. Planning is not a kindness men do for you. Planning is a system, and systems can be run by good men or bad ones, and you will not know which kind of man you have until the ledger comes out.

The only safe way I have found to enjoy a surprise, Denise, is to arrange your life so that no one is close enough to survey your enjoyment of it in the first place. I do not say this lightly. I have built, over many years, a life of considerable and hard-won tranquility, and I did not build it by hoping the next man's folio stayed shut. I built it with distance. A little water between you and the world does wonders — a moat, say, is not the extravagance people assume; a modest one can be dug over a long weekend, and it does more for a woman's peace of mind than any bouquet ever has. I keep three names on record with three different postal services, so that no single itemized receipt can ever again be assembled into a full picture of me. And for company, Denise — real company, the kind that does not keep a ledger — I recommend a tortoise. Mine is named Nathaniel. He has never once asked me to split a bruschetta, and in nine years he has never surprised me with anything but his own continued, patient, undemanding presence, which is, I have come to believe, the only kind of surprise worth having.

I don't say any of this to frighten you out of Denise-and-boyfriend. Truly, some men are simply not planners, the way some people cannot carry a tune, and it is possible — I grant it is possible — that yours is only exactly what he says he is: a man who loves you and dislikes making reservations. If that's so, take the reins yourself and don't apologize for it. Planning is not humiliating. It only becomes humiliating when someone hands you back an invoice for it with a smile still on his face.

But watch him, Denise. Watch how he behaves the one time he does plan something. Does he do it freely, or does he keep score? Does the surprise stay a gift, or does it come with a bill you didn't know you'd agreed to? A man who plans out of love asks for nothing back. A man who plans out of control will eventually, always, present the folio.

I am, I should say, very happy. I want you to hear that plainly, and not as a woman putting a brave face on a quiet life. The moat is mine and I chose it. The names are mine and I chose them. Nathaniel and I take our evenings exactly as we please, with no itemized column anywhere in sight, and I would not trade one hour of it for a hundred perfectly planned dinners with a man holding a pen. If you learn from my mistakes, Denise — really learn from them, not just nod along over your coffee — you can build a life every bit as contented and unbothered as mine. That is the whole of my advice, and I give it to you freely, no ledger attached.

Yours in whatever peace we can still find, Priscilla