How Well Do You Really Know the People You Love?
Have you joined the “Ride or Die” bandwagon yet? I’m all in! 🙂
I’ve been geeking out on this action-comedy series with Hannah Waddingham and Octavia Spencer for so many reasons — one being the power of friendships; another being how the series is tackling perceptions and stereotypes, but in a subtle way. It’s a combination that has also raised a number of questions for me.
Like:
“How well do we know the people we love?”
Without giving anything away, Debbie is a Yale-trained lawyer turned stay-at-home wife and mother who has it all together. Judith is secretly an international assassin. But, Debbie doesn’t know Judith is an assassin and Judith doesn’t know Debbie’s marriage is collapsing.
Yet, they’ve been friends for over two decades!
Reminds me of this as it relates to money: we assume we know someone’s money story because we know them — but financial behavior is often the most hidden part of a relationship, even a close one.
And the truth is none of us are walking around with a neon sign announcing our real story either — especially the money one.
Think about the people closest to you. Your best friend. Your sibling. Maybe even your spouse.
Do you actually know how they feel about money? Not what they earn or how they invest — how they feel.
Whether they lie awake doing math at 2am.
Whether they’ve ever pretended everything’s fine at dinner while quietly panicking about the bill.
Whether they’ve made a decision they’re still ashamed of, or they’re secretly proud of and have never told anyone.
Probably not. And that’s not a failure of friendship or romantic relationship. It’s just how money works.
Money is one of the last places we still perform for each other.
We’ll talk about our marriages falling apart before we’ll talk about our debt. We’ll admit to working with a therapist before we’ll admit we don’t understand our own investment statements. So the people who love us most end up working off an outdated — or just incomplete — draft of our money story.
Here’s what gets me, though: it’s not just that other people don’t know our real story. Half the time, we don’t either.
We inherit scripts about money so early — from family, from culture, from whatever “role” we got cast in growing up — that we start acting them out without questioning whether they’re even true anymore.
The “responsible one.”
The “one who’s bad with money.”
The “one who doesn’t need help.”
Those labels calcify, and eventually we’re not only managing our money — we’re managing the story (even the elements of it that we’re not fully conscious of).
Debbie and Judith get to find out, eventually, what was really going on underneath two decades of friendship. (At least that’s what I suspect; I have a few more episodes to watch before the end of season one.) But, most of us don’t get that reveal. We just keep assuming.
So here’s what I’d love for you to sit with this week:
Pick one person you love. Ask yourself honestly — do you know their real money story, or the version they’ve let you see?
And then turn it inward. Do you know your own?
Because, as I often remind you: financial success is an inside job. It starts with being willing to look — really look — at the story you’re actually living, not the one you’ve gotten comfortable performing.
More on this next week, as we keep pulling this thread.
About Jacquette
I love to ask questions and spark aha moments. I love to talk about why success with money is about more than just the numbers, and how the cultural impact on the intersection of money, business, and life matters–A LOT! And, I really hope I help people feel seen, heard, and not judged—especially since money is emotional and personal.
