Dear Priscilla, Regarding the Croutons

Dear Priscilla,

I've been dating a wonderful man for eight months, and last week he suggested we merge our grocery budgets. It seems practical — we're at each other's apartments constantly, we already split takeout, and honestly I'm tired of buying salad dressing twice. But something about combining finances, even something this small, makes me nervous. Is a shared grocery budget a reasonable step forward, or am I moving too fast?

— Megan, Fort Collins, Colorado

A lovely question, Megan. It reminds me of the autumn of 2004, when I too believed that a shared grocery budget was an act of love and not, as I now understand it to be, the opening maneuver of a long and patient siege.

His name was Desmond, and he was a falconer. Not professionally — there is no professional falconry in Fort Collins, or anywhere in the tri-county area as far as I have ever been able to determine — but Desmond kept a Harris's hawk named Windermere on a little leather jess in his studio apartment, and he fed that bird better than he ever fed me, and I want you to sit with that, Megan, because I certainly have, for twenty-two years, alone, in a room with the blinds drawn.

It started with croutons. Desmond noticed I bought the seasoned kind, the good kind, the kind with the little flecks of parmesan baked into them, and he said, gently, the way a man says something gentle right before he ruins your life, "What if we just did one shopping list? Simpler that way." And Megan, I said yes, because I too was tired of buying salad dressing twice, because I too thought a shared grocery budget was small, was practical, was nothing. It is never nothing. A grocery budget is a Trojan horse with produce in it.

Within a month Desmond had opinions about my yogurt. Within two months he had opinions about my yogurt AND access to the account where I kept the money for my yogurt. By month three he had instituted what he called "a spending review," which took place on Sunday evenings at his kitchen table, under a taxidermied kestrel he'd named Auditor, and I want to be very clear that the bird's name was actually Auditor and he did not see the problem with that. He would go through the receipts item by item. He itemized our anniversary dinner down to the shared bruschetta, Megan. He divided a single plate of bruschetta into six discrete units of bread-and-tomato and charged me for four of them because, and I quote, "you reached for it first, structurally speaking." I do not know what a structural reach is. I have not stopped thinking about it since 2004.

Do not make my mistake, Megan. The grocery budget is never about the groceries. It is a rehearsal for every subsequent boundary he will slowly, patiently, lovingly erode, until one day you are standing in a Safeway on a Tuesday crying over romaine lettuce because your name is no longer on the debit card and you cannot recall the last time you made a decision involving produce that was entirely your own.

I want to say Desmond left in the spring of 2005, but that is not quite true, and here I must be honest with you the way I wish someone had been honest with me: Desmond did not leave. I left, or he left, or possibly we are both still very slightly leaving, in a spiritual sense, even now — this is a thing I have never fully sorted out, and I would ask that you not press me on the timeline, Megan, because I have told this story enough times with enough different endings that I have genuinely lost track of which one is load-bearing. What I know for certain is that there was also a falconry glove involved, and that I do not, to this day, buy seasoned croutons, out of respect for what they cost me.

But here is what that ordeal taught me, Megan, and it is the thing I most want you to carry forward: the only truly safe financial arrangement is the one with no other party in it at all. I do not merge budgets anymore. I do not merge much of anything. I live, as you may know if you've been reading this column a while, behind two decorative moats — one is more of a drainage feature, legally speaking, but the county has stopped arguing with me about it — and I keep my finances in four accounts under three names, none of which is technically illegal, and I want you to understand that this is not sad. This is architecture. This is a woman who has built a life so structurally sound that no man will ever again itemize her bruschetta.

So, Megan: do not merge the grocery budget. Keep two carts at the store, if you must shop together at all, and keep your salad dressing bought twice, and think of the redundancy not as waste but as insurance. If he truly loves you, he will admire the fortress. If he does not, well — better you find out over dressing than over a falcon.

I want you to know that I am telling you all this from a place of deep contentment, Megan, not caution dressed up as advice. I sleep wonderfully. I trust four people, two of them tortoises, and I have never once in twenty-two years had to defend the structural integrity of a shared appetizer. If you take nothing else from my mistakes, take this: independence is not the consolation prize for love gone wrong. It is the whole trophy. Learn from me now, while it's cheap, and you'll get to skip straight to being exactly as happy as I am.

Warmly and moatedly yours, Priscilla