HDS crestSo many lessons we’ve learned, positive and negative, in Sleeping With Money. My story today is about a person I dated while attending Divinity School (yes, that’s school for studying religion) at Harvard in the ’90s.

What a motley crew at Harvard Div: the two largest groups were the true-believer Catholics, and then the anti-Catholics (including many women) who were angry at the church they grew up in, and were educating themselves to fight. We also had Protestants of all denominations, from very liberal UCC (“Unitarians Considering Christ”) to Southern Baptist hellfire and brimstone. We also had a good number of Jews, Hindus, a few Muslims, a good number of atheists, and me, a crypto-Buddhist.

What I honestly didn’t know before I arrived was how very gay most seminaries and divinity schools are! I swear, by my reckoning, about 40% of the student population was not straight. We even had a running joke that the smallest ‘club’ on campus, the Straight White Men, all three of them, could meet in the janitor’s broom closet. The gay folks basically ran the place, dominated discussions, and they dated. And how!

This was the first time in my life I felt truly comfortable being gay, and so I came out of the closet in a big way, during my first month of school. What a liberating experience! I was able to have a boyfriend! And talk about him! In public! And rather than looks of horror or embarrassment, my co-students (gay and straight) replied with questions like “Well, what’s he like?” and “How did you meet?” and “Would you guys like to come to our house for dinner and popcorn later?” What a positive environment for being gay.

Well, during the autumn of my second year at Divinity School I became close to a handsome young man who had caught my eye the year before, but he wasn’t single at the time. Now, at the start of our second year, his long-distance relationship of three years was unraveling, and I have to admit I kind of swooped in. It wasn’t long before we were an item. One of my favorite memories of our relationship is how he had his college friends visiting around Christmas time, all of them from a singing troupe at their old school, and he had them stand around me in a semi-circle while they serenaded me with jazzy Christmas carols.

But one of the most attractive things for me about this guy was that he had money. He came from money. I eventually learned that his family’s trust fund generated over $30,000 a year income for each individual family member. That’s on top of any help his parents chose to give him, for example, paying the high tuition at Harvard; amazing vacations in tropical places during cold months; snazzy cars.

I grew up blue collar (at best) and I was quite taken with the idea that a wealthy family like his might take me in and provide for me the rest of my life. Honestly, this wasn’t the reason that I was in a relationship with him, because I had no inkling of his money when we first began dating. But what an attractive notion. Financial security for the rest of my life, whether I worked or not. No student loans, no borrowing to buy a house. So this is what wealth feels like!

At the same time, I noticed that this fellow had developed behaviors around this wealth, and it was a real lesson to me about how significant wealth can set people apart. He was secretive about it, and rarely wanted to discuss his or his family’s situation. Money was taboo.

When we went out to dinner, there was no question that we were splitting the bill right down the middle, because he never offered to pick it up (despite the fact that he knew I was heavily indebted and struggling to get by). When he went on vacation with his family, he was elusive about where they were going and what they were doing. I wasn’t invited, and fair enough because we really only dated three or four months.

But the lesson I learned is that, for many people, having wealth means living in a bubble. There is the wealthy world, and then everything else around it. Secrecy surrounds wealth, I think, because if you communicate your status, you are opening yourself to a host of requests, and more importantly, feelings of guilt for not answering them. If people don’t know you have a big chunk of change, they can’t ask you for help, and so you don’t have the quandary of (a) helping out, and losing some of your wealth or (b) declining to help, and feeling guilty.

It wasn’t long before we broke up. I couldn’t say exactly why. But within a few weeks, he had hooked up with another Harvard student who was a trust fund baby, and I hear tell that even now, more than 10 years later, they are still together. And maybe that’s something else I’ve learned: you can love whomever you want. But money always loves more money!