Tell themselves that they'd be a bad person if they didn't worry about what to do

At the extreme, stealthily refinanced mortgages cover gambling debts, inheritances are jealously hoarded, or family businesses are run into the ground. More mundanely, a gaping canyon of noncommunication separates the family's designated earner and designated spender, and into the void drift Holy shit! levels of credit-card debt, pricey leases of status-mobiles, and a deluxe dollop of mutual resentment. Some women, whose feminist consciousness is otherwise fully functional, give themselves over to deer-in-the-headlights panic or princess-style unconcern when confronted with the concrete reality of dollars and cents. Some men who otherwise consider themselves enlightened boomerang between tyrannical control and emasculation anxiety. In saying this, I am not talking about the ways in which people emote and just blatantly lie in the name of friendship. The faux-friendliness of the call centre, the salesman and the chat show host is as nauseating, or amusing, as it is transparent. Rather I am talking about people who would count themselves as friends to greater or lesser degrees but nonetheless employ what might be called thekind vices' of half-truth, evasion, pre-varication and pretence. The point is that they sense that the friendship would not bear the weight of the whole truth of what could be said. If that were voiced,the pebbles [would be] set rolling, the friendship would follow after, and fall apart', as Nietzsche put it. The examples of such pretence are legion. Someone smiles rather than admit their malign thoughts about their best friend's new boyfriend. They scream inside rather than speak out on the disciplining of their friends' children. They conveniently forget the suggestion of holidaying together, realising that to go away for two weeks would be a whole different ballgame to merely having dinner every other week. He'd turn to his daughters, one a lawyer, the other a doctor, and order them around. They'd say, We report to Mom. This was not Stan's first frustrating meeting with his family. I was there at his invitation to coach him on how to get his wife and kids to listen. It's not gonna happen, I said to Stan.

But I'm the one who paid for everything. They can't shut me out, he said. True. I nodded. But irrelevant. In this phase of his work, Darwin became quite secretive. Even his own wife did not really know the full extent of what he was up to. We see in this phase that Fitzroy still had a powerful influence on Darwin. The captain--still a selfobject--was the very embodiment of many of the cultural aspirations to which Darwin still clung. Darwin wanted above all things to be able to make a case for his theories that would convince even his beloved friend. He longed for the third way. Alas, it did not entirely work as he'd hoped; Fitzroy slowly became Darwin's greatest skeptic. And sadly, Fitzroy was the skeptic that mattered. Nothing moved quickly in Darwin's world, as he himself admitted. When one or the other pulls the plug on the marriage--it's usually the woman--the grim extent of the financial chaos is revealed. A quarter of those seeking divorce cite different financial priorities/spending patterns as one of their reasons. (It's one of the top five reasons for men, but not for women. ) But once a couple has determined that their different priorities rank as a deal breaker, they move into the two-household zone of compounded financial stress. Money conflict can fan the brushfire of mediation into the inferno of litigation.

Then, the escalation of the couple's rage is matched only by the depletion of their bank accounts. Some folks don't have the gene for it, one divorce lawyer said to me. It's like they can't perceive financial reality. They are mentally unequipped to process the fact that they will run out of money if they don't come to an agreement, or get a job, or save, or invest. Money differences in marriage can be handled effectively in all sorts of ways--pooling or separating resources, rethinking divisions of earning and nonearning labor, creating priorities and savings plans. Alternatively, people can behave almost as if they were different people with different friends, a schizo-phrenia that provokes great anxiety at the thought of, say, a birthday party at which you invite all your friends to come together: you look out at the room, full of everyone you know, and panic that they won't get on, that some will probably fall out. Then there is the competitive element to negotiate. If everyone confessed like Gore Vidal thatwhenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies', friendship would soon die too. (Incidentally, I recently heard Vidal remark that he made that comment as a joke; he didn't really mean it. Only, it is a comment that was remembered as if it were true, which actually underlines its veracity. ) Friends are also complicit in each others' feigning for fear, in Shakespeare's phrase, of appearingunlearned in the world's false subtleties'. Celebrities, again, are past masters at this. Nietzsche records friendship's feigning foibles in a series of aphorisms and comments that are sharp, often playful and should perhaps be read as if uttered by Woody Allen, excusing the Germanic constructions. In many people, the gift of having good friends is much greater than the gift of being a good friend. You're making a false equivalency between your career as a CEO and your authority at home. Your family obviously doesn't see it that way. You put them in charge. The foundation is their responsibility. You can't undo that.

All you can do is accept that you may be in charge at work but not at home. The problem, I quickly saw, was environmental. Holding the meeting in a home environment rather than at the foundation's office confused the situation: was this a business or family matter? It certainly confused Stan, who behaved like an imperious chief executive when he should have been a more inclusive husband and father. I knew Stan to be a classic people person, an expert at reading the temperature in any room. Darwin's own awakening to the truth of his theory of evolution only came slowly, ploddingly and systematically. He himself describes his very gradual shedding of the doctrines and dogmas of Christianity, and particularly of its views of the creation story in Genesis. - disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate [wrote Darwin in his autobiography], but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct. I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my father, brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine. As Darwin settled into the secret refinement of his theory of evolution at Down House, his regular debates with Fitzroy allowed him to understand more deeply the opposing point of view. They pushed him to continually refine his thinking. He was using the adversary to his advantage. But they all depend on thinking together. What enables a couple to collaborate about money, or anything else, is being able to look together at the big picture. Then they can discuss, compromise on, and integrate their ideas. They can set shared goals, financially and otherwise. A nerdwallet.

com columnist wrote that the best way to build wealth is by following the one house, one spouse rule. It's a glib little phrase, but it also economically captures how a shared, coherent worldview--emotional and financial--is what helps couples prosper over the long term. There may be no area of marriage where the golden-ring model is more challenged than in the area of money. Not having enough creates intense fear in people, and it is hard not to deteriorate into a seesaw mind-set, where it's every man for himself. Money is an acid test of the we story. One should not talk about one's friends: otherwise one will talk away the feeling of friendship. The man had the great works but his companion had the great faith in these works. They were inseparable: but it was obvious that the former depended wholly on the latter. They were friends and have ceased to be, and they both severed their friendship at the same time: the one because he thought himself too much misunderstood, the other because he thought himself understood too well - and both were deceiving themselves! - for neither understood himself well enough. All this is the art of friendship and a fine art it is too. Its method is appropriateness. Its message is,I know you know but we both know not to go there. ' Its medium is often gossip, because what is not spoken to one friend is usually whispered to another: 'There will be few who, when they are in want of matter for conversation, do not reveal the more secret affairs of their friends', wrote Nietzsche. Yet here with his family, triggered by the environment of his home, he was behaving against his best interests - and unaware of it. What would it cost you psychically to exit the situation? I asked. It was my idea, said Stan, persisting in his belief that he still had ownership in the foundation. Stan, your family is rebelling against your behavior, not you, I said.