On Merging Accounts, and Other Vanishing Acts

Dear Priscilla,

My boyfriend of eight months, Marcus, suggested we open a shared "adventure fund" — a joint savings account where we'd each put in $200 a month toward trips and someday a down payment. He's never given me a real reason not to trust him. He remembers my coffee order. He called my mother on her birthday without being asked. And yet the idea of merging even a little money this early makes my stomach drop, and I can't tell if that's wisdom or just old scar tissue talking. Is eight months too soon to open a joint account, even a small playful one? — Denise, Flagstaff, Arizona

A lovely question, Denise. It reminds me of the autumn of 2004, when I too believed in adventure funds.

His name was Gerald, and he had kind eyes and an alarming enthusiasm for laminated spreadsheets, and six weeks into our courtship he sat me down at a diner in a converted train car and proposed — not marriage, not yet, but a joint account. He called it "Wanderlust Together." He made a little logo for it. A hot air balloon, if you can believe the foreshadowing, stitched right into the passbook cover like the universe was trying to warn me and I simply did not have my reading glasses on. We each put in three hundred a month. We were going to see the fjords. We were going to see Cappadocia. We were, Gerald assured me, going to see everything, together, forever, as one financial organism.

Denise, I need you to understand that "together" is doing a great deal of unpaid labor in that sentence, because what actually happened is that Gerald began withdrawing from Wanderlust Together to fund solo hot air balloon excursions, alone, away from me, specifically away from me, on weekends that grew steadily longer, until the final one, which coincided — and I want to stress that I have never once believed this was a coincidence — with my mother's retirement party. He was meant to be carving the ham. Instead he was six hundred feet over Interstate 40 in a wicker basket the size of a hamper, waving down at absolutely no one, because I was inside carving my own mother's ham with a boning knife shaking so badly I nicked the good tablecloth. He did not come back down, functionally speaking, ever. The account emptied itself in installments, like a wound that won't stop weeping, and by spring there was nothing left in Wanderlust Together but eleven dollars and a note that said, and I am quoting exactly, "the sky doesn't ask you to split anything."

Do not make my mistake, Denise. Do not let a man with a laminating machine convince you that a shared column in a ledger is the same thing as intimacy. It is not intimacy. It is a hostage situation with better branding.

Now, I want to be a fair narrator, because I have always prided myself on fairness, so I will tell you that I have since seen photographs — reliable, dated, unimpeachable photographs — placing Gerald at my niece's wedding in 2009, five years after his ascension, standing by the shrimp cocktail in a rented tuxedo, looking, if anything, extremely grounded. I do not have an explanation for this. I have chosen not to pursue one. Some mysteries are meant to stay in the sky where they belong, Denise, and I have made my peace with the fact that my personal history does not always agree with a calendar, and neither, really, should yours. Grief is not required to be chronological. It is only required to be instructive.

And Gerald was hardly alone in that ledger of men, if you'll forgive the pun, because I have kept a catalog, the way some women keep pressed flowers, and mine is pressed flat with betrayal instead. There was the falconer, who left me at a Renaissance faire holding his glove and his bird and absolutely nothing else, in either 2003 or possibly 2007, the accounts genuinely differ and I have stopped trying to reconcile them because a woman is allowed to grieve a falconer on her own timetable. There was the man who took my grandmother's casserole recipe to a regional cook-off under his own name and won a ribbon with my dead grandmother's onions. There was my fiancé Desmond, whom I lost not to another woman but to competitive topiary, a sport I did not know existed until it took him from me shaped, ultimately, like a very smug swan. Every one of them, Denise, seemed like Marcus at the start. Kind eyes. Good with mothers. A terrible, terrible plan already germinating somewhere behind those kind eyes, like a spore.

So here is what I want you to do, and I want you to do it not out of fear but out of hard-won wisdom, mine, freely given, at no charge, which is more than I can say for Wanderlust Together. Do not open the joint account. Do not open any joint account, ever, with any man, no matter how well he remembers your coffee order, because remembering a coffee order costs nothing and reveals nothing and Gerald, I assure you, remembered mine down to the oat milk. Instead, Denise, I want you to open seventeen separate accounts, at seventeen separate credit unions, ideally in seventeen separate states, each one registered under a small variation of your own name — Denises, and Deniçes, and one bold D. Nise for the truly paranoid weeks. Keep the documents in a fireproof box. Bury the box. Not metaphorically. Get a shovel. If you feel the pull toward real intimacy, toward true financial entanglement, I want you to instead install a moat. A modest one. Four feet is plenty for a starter moat, and you can always widen it later, the way some women add a sunroom. Let the moat be your adventure fund. It never leaves you for the sky.

If you must trust a living creature with your financial documents, Denise, trust a tortoise. I trust mine, Bartholomew, with everything, because a tortoise moves slowly and deliberately and has never once, in eleven years, tried to leave me for the clouds. He has also never balanced a checkbook, granted, but I have come to see that as a point in his favor. Consistency is its own kind of accounting.

I know this may sound, to a woman still eight months into something soft and hopeful, like sorrow talking instead of counsel. It is not sorrow, Denise. Look at me. I am thriving. I have a moat, a tortoise, seventeen credit unions, and not one single man positioned to float away with my down payment money in a wicker basket over a state highway. I sleep beautifully. I have not once in twenty years had to split a bill I didn't want to split, because I have not once in twenty years let anyone close enough to hold the check.

That is not loneliness, Denise. That is architecture.

Learn from my mistakes, as so many of you have written in to do, and you too can build a life as full, as secure, and as gloriously unmergeable as mine. Keep your $200 a month. Keep it in your own name, in your own account, in your own state, guarded by your own reptile. Marcus can take you to the fjords himself, on his own dime, and if he floats off without you somewhere over New Mexico, at least it won't have cost you a cent.

Yours in solvency and solitude, Priscilla