Why You Shouldn’t Try to Pay Mom-In-Law for Thanksgiving

Date Posted: December 2nd, 2010

This is an update of a post I wrote 2 years ago. I keep wanting to link to it because the content is good, but since I’d just started writing for the blog the presentation was…uh… less than perfect. Below is an attempt to improve it.

Chapter 4 of Dan Airely’s Predictably Irrational opens with the following paragraph:

You are at your mother-in-law’s house for Thanksgiving dinner, and what a sumptuous spread she has put on the table for you! The turkey is roasted to a golden brown; the stuffing is homemade and exactly the way you like it. Your kids are delighted: the sweet potatoes are crowned with marshmallows. And your wife is flattered: her favorite recipe for pumpkin pie has been chosen for dessert.

The festivities continue into the late afternoon. You loosen your belt and sip a glass of wine. Gazing fondly across the table at your mother-in-law, you rise to your feet and pull out your wallet. “Mom, for all the love you’ve put into this, how much do I owe you?” you say sincerely. As silence descends on the gathering, you have a handful of bills. “Do you think three hundred dollars will do it? No, wait, I should give you four hundred!”

This is not a picture that Norman Rockwell would have painted. A glass of wine falls over, your mother-in-law stands up red-faced; your sister-in-law shoots you an angry look; and your niece bursts into tears. Next year’s Thanksgiving celebration, it seems, may be a frozen dinner in front of the television set.

During the rest of the chapter he describes how “market forces”–using money to pay for the value of something–and “social norms”–acting out of love or honor–don’t mix. In this case, attempting to pay your mother-in-law for her socially priceless home-cooked Thanksgiving meal is a very bad idea.

This story struck a nerve. I could easily envision my family reacting this way, and it’s the kind of thing that bothers me. What’s inherently wrong with putting a price on Thanksgiving? Is it actually priceless? Why are we uncomfortable thinking about it? It doesn’t make any sense.

Our Distant Relative the Chimpanzee

A few months years ago I read Frans de Waal’s Our Inner Ape, which shows how apes exhibit many of the tendencies we think of as unique to modern humans, including reciprocity. According to the book, emotionally close chimps have a fluid relationship. Neither chimp keeps score. They help each other out when they can and don’t worry about what’s owed. Chimps that aren’t close to each other care about what’s owed. They expect payback for favors. If chimp A extends himself for chimp B who he is not close to, A expects B to help out when he needs it. If B doesn’t there will be problems.

We experience the same thing all the time. If you help an acquaintance move his couch you expect that, barring extenuating circumstances, when you need to move your couch he’ll help you out. But if it’s your best friend or sibling it feels like a different situation. When you help them out, you aren’t thinking of it as insurance that you’ll get help later. You’re doing it because that’s what you’re supposed to do. Because it feels right.

As a rule, these sort of evolutionarily acquired behaviors show up as instinctive feelings. Fight or flight is a good example. Parental attachment to children is another. So it makes sense that we feel uncomfortable when our close friends keep score of favors. It’s instinctive.

How does this relate to Thanksgiving at your mother-in-law’s? I’m getting to that. First we have to talk about money.

What does Money Have to Do With it?

It’s just about impossible to fit money into social norms… for a number of reasons:

• It’s too neat. Reciprocity is instant. The score is always even.
• Most of us don’t have the means to pay for the gifts we are given. If you calculate how much you’d have to pay at a restaurant for the quality of a well cooked home-made meal… it’d be a lot. A multi-course holiday feast would be even more. Or how about getting help moving across town? Professional movers are expensive! If we had to pay for our friends’ services, many of us wouldn’t be able to afford it. And if you added to that a tip for them doing it without expecting to get paid… yeah.
• Putting a price on a gift given lovingly taints it. It’s gone from “gift” to “product to be purchased”. Doesn’t matter if you were generous with how much you thought it was worth, it’s still tainted. We don’t like it when someone tries to buy our love. It feels icky and wrong. You have to give a very convincing explanation to have money taken as a token of appreciation instead of a form of payment.
• Giving money says “You are a stranger.” When you go to a restaurant, you pay for the meal. The restaurant staff has scratched your back by giving you food and a pleasant atmosphere, and you scratch theirs by paying for the service with money. The restaurant owner, presumably, provided you with the meal primarily so he could get paid. You paid for it so you could complete the transaction as quickly as possible. Money is how mutually beneficial transactions between strangers happen.

Going back to Thanksgiving at Mom-in-Law’s, she got pissed that you tried to pay her because she felt she was being treated as a stranger, someone who can be paid off and never thought of again. And she thought you were trying to buy the gift she gave you out of love. Sure, you didn’t mean it like that, but her flipping out was instinctive.

So that’s why no one pays for Thanksgiving. Of course, Thanksgiving is a contrived example since most of us weren’t planning to pay Mom-in-Law in the first place, but this “you don’t pay family for favors” thing has other everyday implications…

Tags: Family, Relationships, Subconscious.
Posted at 4:31 pm | 1 Comment »

On Eloping Before Getting Married

Date Posted: September 22nd, 2010

The second part of Many Bad Business Ideas is being postponed for a week because this post needed to be up today. Enjoy!

One year ago today, me, Aaron and some of our local friends gathered at the entrance to Nichols Arboretum. We walked to the riverfront in full pirate regalia singing sea shanties. When we got to the right spot Aaron and I said some words, got spaghetti thrown at us, and then signed some rather serious papers. Yes, Aaron and I got married a year ago. Also, yes, our wedding was in June.

The story starts last fall when I got my job at the University. As with all University jobs the benefits were fantastic. Excellent retirement plan, excellent vacation plan, and of course, excellent health-care plan. Aaron was still working for the start-up company, and his benefits were… less excellent. We did the math and figured out that we’d save money by having him be my dependent on my plan. He’d easily qualify as an Other Qualified Adult since we’d been domestic partners for two and a half years. Our plan was to go with that until the wedding in June and switch to spouse afterward. Then for kicks we figured out how much we’d save if we were married…

Between tax and insurance we figured we’d save around $700. That was a pretty amount significant for us. Was waiting until June worth $700? We’d been engaged for 9 months already, been living together for two and a half years…

After a few days of mulling it over we decided that, no, waiting until June was not worth $700. We also decided that we’d keep the “wedding” a secret. We’d know, the government would know, and no one else. That was the plan..

Then we found out that our friend was already an ordained minister of the Universal Life Church. Meaning she could marry us. For free. Unsurprisingly we let her in on the secret. Our friend agreed to marry us with the condition that the wedding be a Pastafarian ceremony, we agreed as long as the people present kept it a sekrit, and the rest, as they say, is history.

I wish that was the end of my post, but a lot of things happened afterward that I didn’t expect. Things that would have made me think twice if I had known about them. Below I’ll share some of those things.

It ended up being more meaningful than we intended it to.

We’d intended for the first ceremony to just be play acting and paper signing. No one would need to know about the “wedding” because effectively nothing had changed. Sure we saved a bit of money and would file our taxes differently, but other than that had anything significant happened? We were already living together.

But the “wedding” was in the Arb, a place that has special meaning to us and where we would have loved to have had the June wedding.

And then three months later (exactly) we bought a house. If we hadn’t been legally married we wouldn’t have even considered buying a house together.

Between the wish fulfillment and the house buying, the September “wedding” ended up meaning more to us than we expected/intended it to. Oops.

This wasn’t a bad thing or a good thing. It just wasn’t anticipated.

It’s hard to keep secrets.

I think I enjoyed having a special little secret for about a week. After that it was frustrating. People I cared about would talk to me as if I was signing the papers in June and I wasn’t. It was weird. And uncomfortable because Aaron and I weren’t the only people at the “wedding”. Were the people at the Sekrit Pirate Wedding better than the ones that weren’t? I didn’t like thinking about that question.

Clearly I wasn’t going to be able to keep this thing secret for the next 9 months. We needed to reevaluate our position, so we asked ourselves, “Why are we keeping the secret wedding a secret?” There were two reasons: 1) we didn’t want people to take the June wedding any less seriously and 2) we didn’t want people to feel bad about not being at the secret wedding.

When we looked at the first reason, we decided that reasoning was flawed. Keeping the September wedding secret meant that the people who came to the June wedding would be there under the false pretense that we hadn’t signed the marriage license yet. We’d be lying to them so they’d believe a lie. Um… not so wonderful. As for the second reason… that’s their problem, not ours. The point was to save money, not to exclude people. That should be fairly obvious.

So we decided to tell people if the subject came up in conversation. No official announcements because we felt that that would be making a big deal out of the elopement.

This was, again, more unanticipated than bad. I didn’t think I’d have a hard time keeping it secret since nothing had changed for us, but the topic kept coming up. Mostly people would ask if our June officiant was ordained, and of course, he didn’t have to be anymore since we’d already had the papers signed. Our choices were lie or tell people. *Sigh*

Some people took not being at/knowing about Secret Wedding Really Hard.

A lot harder than I expected. Not everyone, but some.

I was totally blindsided by this. A true wedding, to me, is about a public commitment. This “wedding” was about saving money on taxes and insurance.

This was decidedly a negative thing, and is something I’d have paid more attention to if I were doing it again. There were a few people I left out of the loop that I shouldn’t have.

People didn’t know how to interpret the June wedding.

This wasn’t very surprising given that we didn’t know how to interpret the June wedding. Which one was real? Was the June one just for show?

There we were, two people who’d been living together for 3 years, signed the marriage license 8 months ago, and the ceremony wasn’t even in a Church. The only things the June wedding had going for it were elaborate costumes, food, dancing, and cake.

I suppose it’s appropriate that my wedding ended up being an exercise in thinking about “what makes a wedding a wedding”, but appropriate is not the same thing as fun.

This was another neutral thing, although this one I saw coming. We’d planned to keep the confusion to ourselves by keeping the September wedding a secret, but when that didn’t work… oh well.

We could buy a house.

Getting married earlier meant we could get the house we’re living in now. If we’d waited until June we probably wouldn’t have it.

This was a major advantage that we hadn’t considered in September.

It was a Huge emotional stress relief.

I remember right before the September wedding I spent a lot of time thinking about what getting married meant. Signing papers meant breaking up would be a legal mess, so I took the time to think things through. Also I knew that in June I wouldn’t have the time for contemplation, and even if I did it’d be hard to be detached when we’d spent all that time and money on the wedding.

If I had to guess, I’d say the lack of time to digest what’s happening is a major reason why brides (and maybe grooms too?) freak out right before their wedding. I remember a feeling of uncertainty right before and after the September wedding. That would have been extremely unsettling in June, but since the damage had already been done I was very calm and happy.

This was undoubtedly a nice side effect of eloping first.

The June wedding had a special meaning.

And the September one did too for that matter. Unfortunately I didn’t figure out what these meanings were until June.

The September wedding was about me and Aaron. No one else. The people that were there were 100% spectators. I think it’d have been a similar experience if none of them had been there.

The June wedding was less about us and more about the communities we love and are a part of. The wedding was made possible by our communities. Without them it wouldn’t have been the same wedding… at all. It was us saying “Yes, we love you. We’re here to stay!” It was also the place where Aaron and I solidified what our marriage meant to us. September was all non-verbal. (I think I’d committed to loving him even if his arm got torn off by a shark… or something.) June was verbal and explicit. Our vows and our readings were very meaningful to us.

This was another nice side effect of eloping first.

Given the same circumstances, but knowing what I know now, would I do it again?

If the practical incentives were there, yes I’d do it again. (I’m really happy we could buy the house.) But I’d do it differently. Namely, I’d have told people about the September wedding without hesitation, and I’d have explained that the September wedding was private and the June one would be public and community focused. Both real. Both different.

If there were no financial incentives, would I have eloped?

That is, if it was just as easy to buy a house, and we wouldn’t have saved money on the insurance, would I have done it again?

I don’t think I would have for 3 reasons.

1. It would have taken a lot more courage. Here at least we could tell people we did it for tax and insurance purposes and they’d mostly understand. Eloping for emotional purposes only… not so much.
2. I wonder what the experience would have been like to do it all at once. I felt like I was missing something by being so calm at my wedding. I’ve heard it’s supposed to be a crazy emotional experience, and I wasn’t freaking out at either the September or June wedding. :-/
3. We could have gone to the Arb a day or two afterward and had our private time to process our vows. I think that would have had a similar effect.

All in all this eloping before getting married thing was an interesting experience. I’m happy we did it.

And with that I raise a tall glass of grog to you all. Arr! Happy AnniversARRy AARRon.

Tags: Family, Relationships.
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