My best friend is kind and considerate – except when it comes to splitting the bill. Should I risk our friendship by taking it up with her?
The dilemma I have an issue with my closest friend, who I've known for 15 years. We are both in our 60s. She also gets on well with my husband, and the three of us have holidayed together. The problem is that she is tight-fisted! When we first started meeting for coffee or lunch, I would pick up the bill, but she was very reluctant take her turn. Then we started paying separately and now we go through this incredibly nitpicking arrangement, yet I still usually lose out. On holiday she reimbursed me the evening before we travelled home in a currency that I will probably never use again. Am I being as petty-minded as my friend in even noticing this peculiar quirk in her otherwise considerate personality? It's not that I can't afford to sub her in this very small way, but I find it irritating that she is so unaware of it when she is so aware in other ways. Do you think, as I do, that it would ruin our friendship to mention it? I cannot consider another holiday without finding a strategy for coping with this.
Mariella replies Ah, the miseries and mysteries of Mammon! You can pry into the deepest recesses of a friend's psyche, but asking them what they earn remains one of the great taboos. Here in the UK we have a schizophrenic relationship to cash: our lives are increasingly devoted to the making, spending and occasionally saving of it, yet any sort of frank disclosure of what we've got is considered extremely bad taste. You can voice your desire to be a millionaire, but reveal the real-life contents of your bank account and you're cast adrift in the social wilderness.
I wonder whether our firmly held belief that all things financial are essentially tacky, ergo making money is a dirty pursuit, is a uniquely British peccadillo. It must count as a handicap. If the very substance your working life is focused on accruing is as unmentionable as herpes, then where's the joy in achieving your goals? Could it be at the heart of why we're becoming a slip-behind nation instead of a drive-ahead one?
Even the French, with their gargantuan state apparatus, are richer and enjoy better-quality lives than ours. If we have identity issues here that hold us back from going all out to achieve our aims, I'd argue that attitudes to money are at the heart of much of that dysfunction. Certainly in America the old adage "If you've got it, flaunt it" holds true, and on the plus side makes their super-wealthy some of the most philanthropic people on earth. A dinner party in the US with successful types wouldn't be complete without a boast or two about what's been earned that year, which certainly puts the elephant on the table. In the UK everyone would be pretending to be skint and elaborating on the joys of their latest buy from Primark.
Disclosing the number of noughts you've got stashed would be on a par with snogging your host's wife and result in you being knocked off the guest list. My bet is it's a hangover from the days of the idle aristocracy, when the peasants did all the work and the landowners spent the proceeds. If you can't be bothered to work then what a clever ruse to make remuneration a topic as dirty as the soil your workforce buries its hands in on your behalf.
Only deep-seated and ancient social mores could possibly explain why we'll talk to friends about the most intimate details of our lives, our hopes, dreams, fantasies and betrayals – often committing crimes of gross indiscretion against our families in the process – yet when it comes to cash we are like tentative teenagers dancing around the topic on tenterhooks.
This is all an extremely longwinded way of saying perhaps it's time to stop disguising your frustration with your pal's parsimony. You can make her aware of her own shortcomings on the financial front and hopefully tease her into being a little more profligate with her contributions. If making a joke – delivered with humour and without rancour – of actions such as her foreign-currency fraud doesn't work, then you'll have to be even more direct. Plan out your vacations like you might a family budget, creating a central pot for day-to-day expenses into which you both contribute, the excess of which gets redistributed on your return. Or come up with a plan of your own and don't be shy about elaborating on it – there is always a diplomatic way of framing such suggestions. Good friends are hard to come by and worth treasuring, as is your money. In an ideal world you should try not to squander either.
If you have a dilemma, send a brief email to mariella.frostrup@observer.co.uk. To have your say on this week's column, go to guardian.co.uk/dearmariella. Follow Mariella on Twitter at @mariellaf1
Source http://www.guardian.co.uk/
Mariella replies Ah, the miseries and mysteries of Mammon! You can pry into the deepest recesses of a friend's psyche, but asking them what they earn remains one of the great taboos. Here in the UK we have a schizophrenic relationship to cash: our lives are increasingly devoted to the making, spending and occasionally saving of it, yet any sort of frank disclosure of what we've got is considered extremely bad taste. You can voice your desire to be a millionaire, but reveal the real-life contents of your bank account and you're cast adrift in the social wilderness.
I wonder whether our firmly held belief that all things financial are essentially tacky, ergo making money is a dirty pursuit, is a uniquely British peccadillo. It must count as a handicap. If the very substance your working life is focused on accruing is as unmentionable as herpes, then where's the joy in achieving your goals? Could it be at the heart of why we're becoming a slip-behind nation instead of a drive-ahead one?
Even the French, with their gargantuan state apparatus, are richer and enjoy better-quality lives than ours. If we have identity issues here that hold us back from going all out to achieve our aims, I'd argue that attitudes to money are at the heart of much of that dysfunction. Certainly in America the old adage "If you've got it, flaunt it" holds true, and on the plus side makes their super-wealthy some of the most philanthropic people on earth. A dinner party in the US with successful types wouldn't be complete without a boast or two about what's been earned that year, which certainly puts the elephant on the table. In the UK everyone would be pretending to be skint and elaborating on the joys of their latest buy from Primark.
Disclosing the number of noughts you've got stashed would be on a par with snogging your host's wife and result in you being knocked off the guest list. My bet is it's a hangover from the days of the idle aristocracy, when the peasants did all the work and the landowners spent the proceeds. If you can't be bothered to work then what a clever ruse to make remuneration a topic as dirty as the soil your workforce buries its hands in on your behalf.
Only deep-seated and ancient social mores could possibly explain why we'll talk to friends about the most intimate details of our lives, our hopes, dreams, fantasies and betrayals – often committing crimes of gross indiscretion against our families in the process – yet when it comes to cash we are like tentative teenagers dancing around the topic on tenterhooks.
This is all an extremely longwinded way of saying perhaps it's time to stop disguising your frustration with your pal's parsimony. You can make her aware of her own shortcomings on the financial front and hopefully tease her into being a little more profligate with her contributions. If making a joke – delivered with humour and without rancour – of actions such as her foreign-currency fraud doesn't work, then you'll have to be even more direct. Plan out your vacations like you might a family budget, creating a central pot for day-to-day expenses into which you both contribute, the excess of which gets redistributed on your return. Or come up with a plan of your own and don't be shy about elaborating on it – there is always a diplomatic way of framing such suggestions. Good friends are hard to come by and worth treasuring, as is your money. In an ideal world you should try not to squander either.
If you have a dilemma, send a brief email to mariella.frostrup@observer.co.uk. To have your say on this week's column, go to guardian.co.uk/dearmariella. Follow Mariella on Twitter at @mariellaf1
Source http://www.guardian.co.uk/
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