I try to keep money and emotions apart. If I’m playing cards, I try to avoid thinking “I’ve got five bucks in, so I should keep betting” — after all, if you have a bad hand, you’re throwing good money after bad. But forming a household is the ultimate combination of everything you have and feel and know. It’s betting with everything you have, with incomplete information, depending on luck and gut feelings and emotional strength.
Early on in a relationship, in the back of your mind there’s the little voice saying hey, no problem, if the going gets tough I can bail without too much penalty. But at some point you realize you are very much invested in the whole relationship: emotions, obviously, but also time and money and everything material. And what ties your physical and financial ship to the other person is this completely intangible web of trust and respect and love.
At that point, you really have too much in the pot to just fold. This is the territory that so many men try so hard and so irrationally to avoid, it’s the reason they inexplicably stop returning calls. The little voice in your head starts worrying: if you break up, who gets the vacuum and the pets and the plants, who gets the friends? We’re both on the lease, what if I’m stuck paying two rents? We bought a bed together, and what will I sleep on? And if you start thinking about buying a car or a house together, and you sign on a debt together, then you have to know This is Permanent. This is a No Matter What kind of situation. This is why they say better or worse, this is why breaking up is just harder and harder, and you really have combined your entire spiritual, emotional, financial, material life with that of another person.
At this point, you better look at your cards and be able to say honestly, this this is the best hand I’ve ever seen, this is the best hand I can imagine. I will play this hand to the bitter end and I will bet everything and I will win big. That’s a scary moment when you’re playing poker with friends and there’s ten bucks in the pot, and when you’re playing for everything in a game you don’t really understand, it keeps you up at night.
I don’t know when it stops, but I guess at some point the decision is made, and it feels right, and things work out, and then you can sleep at night and know you’ve won, and instead of playing poker you can play hearts, or maybe Scrabble, which isn’t so nerve-wracking, and allows you to sit around the couch with your family and friends and forget to keep score.
Secretly Ironic 