Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell . . . How Much You Make

About once a month I get together with one of my buddies for dinner. It’s just the two of us, and we typically meet up at a local burger joint. Nothing special and certainly nothing fancy. Just the two of us catching up, and sharing a couple laughs. We’d probably get together more often but he is single, has no kids, has no commitments outside of work, lives in the city, and dates a variety of women . . . which basically means we have nothing in common. I sometimes wonder how we communicate with one another. I have trouble going 20 minutes without telling some silly story about one of my kids, and I suspect he has trouble going 20 minutes without telling me some lurid story of how he had sex in the back of a BMW with some girl last Tuesday night. I find myself sometimes staring at him with the same kind of bewilderment that a young child experiences when he first walks in on his parents having sex. Sort of shock and awe all at once.

But in addition to this International Man of Mystery type of lifestyle he seems to lead, the thing that I am always trying to figure out is just how much money he makes and/or has. I’m convinced it’s substantial with bank accounts in both Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. I’m positive he spends at least part of his day managing his own money while trying to figure out which companies or businesses he wants to do a hostile takeover of.

Then again, my friend could very well make sixty-five thousand dollars a year, and carry a five figure credit card balance on his Visa card. I honestly have absolutely NO IDEA!! And not because I don’t know this guy. I do. He’s been a good friend of mine for close to 10 years now. But the thing is guys just don’t talk about money. Specifically they don’t talk about how much they make or how much they’ve saved. Literally this subject is off limits between guys. Whether it’s good friends, brothers or fathers, guys DO NOT compare notes when it comes to money.

Now we’ll tell each other about genital warts, prostitutes, prostitutes we got genital warts from, prostitutes we’ve given genital warts to, and prostitutes who got genital warts from other prostitutes at a particularly good bachelor party, but we won’t tell each other about our salaries.

We’ll tell each other about how often we’re having sex with our wives, what position our wives like, what position our wives don’t like, what our wives used to do before we got married and what our wives no longer do now that we are married, but we won’t tell each other how much we’ve saved.

We’ll share x-rated emails we’ve gotten from co-workers with our friends, we’ll gladly share porn with our friends, we’ll talk about crazy family members with our friends and we have no problem talking about our kids and their issues or problems with our friends, but we won’t tell our friends about our tax bracket.

It’s way too personal. More so than the number of women we’ve slept with. Hell that number we’ll gladly talk about, and in fact we’ll typically inflate that number, but we’re not going to talk about salaries with even our best friends.

Now guys certainly give away hints as to their salary and/or net worth. If a guy is driving around in a brand new Porsche you can assume that he’s having a good year. And if a guy is building a new house or adding a big addition onto his current house you can make the assumption that he’s strung together a number of good years. But then again I walked into a car dealership just 16 months ago and leased a forty thousand dollar automobile by simply signing my name on a piece of paper. Literally I remember the salesman asking me what I did for a living and I said “I’m unemployed,” and his next question was “do you want heated seats in the car?” And though obviously banks have really cut down on their lending practices, just four or five years ago you could probably get a bank to loan you a half million dollars just by flashing a smile. So the nice car and the big house are not always a tell-tale sign of someone having a good year. Based on the car I drive and the size of my house most people would assume that I’m doing well, and three days ago I took $30 out of my son’s wallet to pay for dinner . . . and I’m now paying my son back in small installments.

For men, money is for establishing dominance. The guy with platinum status gets on the plane first. The rest of us board after the people with small kids or those accompanying disabled travelers. It’s why we say things like “Would you drink your own piss for $500?” Everyone has “a price,” and most guys want to figure out what the other guy’s “price” is.

We idolize Mark Zuckerberg and Warren Buffett, and we ABSOLUTELY LOVE IT when a hot-shot athlete declares bankruptcy. Nothing makes us feel better then when some famous football player who was cooler than everyone else, and who drove around in Lamborghinis and who got more action than the best porn stars, goes belly-up. Those bankruptcies restore a little bit of fairness to a frustrating game with random rules. I mean how else can you explain the guy who created the Angry Birds app making WAY MORE than a dedicated nurse or teacher? You can’t.

But all this curiosity, and even jealousness, can hurt friendships. After all, men friend for life. I have high school and college friends whose incomes are probably wildly different than mine. Women make new friends continually at every stage of their lives. So if you piss one friend off, they are easily replaced. That’s not true with guys.

So while I am dying to know how much my friend makes, I am not going to ask . . . EVER. In the end I respect his privacy or secrecy surrounding this one subject. Heck when all is said and done a guy’s income is not the only thing he keeps from his pals. Guys cry, but most certainly don’t admit it. Hell, I had to leave the room at the end of Marley and Me (when Owen Wilson’s character tells Marley he’s the best dog in the world right before the vet puts him down . . . literally, I almost fell apart in front of my wife AND son . . . later when my son asked me where I went I told him I had a bad stomach and had to run to the bathroom). Guys read chick magazines, but we don’t admit it (is there any better bathroom reading material than People Magazine???). We watch chick flicks and/or chick TV . . . I loved Sex in the City . . . and the first season of Desperate Housewives. We occasionally refuse sex. I said occasionally, and there are usually VERY SPECIFIC CIRCUMSTANCES surrounding that refusal . . . like I just had a vasectomy six hours ago . . . but it does happen, and when it does we don’t admit to it. And we occasionally like girly drinks . . . is there anything better than being on a beach in Mexico sipping a Pina Colada?

And by the way . . . if you were to read NOTHING BUT THAT LAST PARAGRAPH you’d assume I was incredibly effeminate. I’m not, but that’s why we don’t admit that kind of stuff to other dudes. And reading this blog, you might think I make no money at all . . . you’ll never really know, will you? I certainly won’t tell.