Old Love, New Challenges

Next month, Dean and I will celebrate nine years together. I know to some of you marathon-marrieds it seems like the blink of an eye, but by modern relationship standards it's pretty respectable. I just can't believe it's been that long - sometimes it feels like we're still dating. In these nine years, our love has survived two cross-country moves, grad school, four cats (and countless rescued transients), seven Christmases apart, and three apartments.

But here's the true test: Can our relationship withstand our very first joint bank account? Even after marriage we never saw a need to combine finances since both of us were making decent money and we knew we'd have to close our account anyway once the inevitable exodus from Florida occurred. He looked the other way on my mean feral cat habit and I did the same for his baseball junk collectibles. The cats are mostly out of the picture (except for a small stipend towards the new feeder as a gesture of appreciation and support) and I don't think his baseball spending will put us out on the streets. But I am already feeling much more accountable for my expenses and let's face it, women do most of the spending between groceries, odds and ends (what I call "Target stuff"), and our personal upkeep does tend to require a little more. Maybe in these tough economic times it's good to be occasionally questioned about the massive amounts of money being spent on Pretzel Chips and Skinny Cow Sundae Cones. I'm clearly not the only one eating it (the last bag of Pretzel Chips disappeared before I ate a single chip!). Perhaps we will both evaluate our habits for awhile until we decide that accountability about our eating habits is like lifting up a rock and watching all your nasty vices scurry away to find more darkness and we'll go back to the original plan of looking the other way.