Lunch. It was only lunch. “Let’s pay for lunch,” Sandy Silver said as nonchalantly as a husband might expect. But Steve Silver had a calculator in his head. And this lunch, at this time, in this place, with this many people, was adding up in a hurry. Steve balked. “We’ve picked up too many checks already,” he said.
That little comment set a spark to dry tinder, and the ensuing hours constituted a very rough patch. You never want misery in your marriage; you especially don’t want it when you’re vacationing in Tuscany, Italy, in celebration of your fortieth wedding anniversary.
But looking back on it, as brave in humility as this requires a man to be, Steve Silver will tell you now, three years later, that this was the end of one of the enduring traits of what he calls his “Old Man.”
“Sandy’s default is ‘pay for everything,’” he says. My default is ‘protect the nest egg.’” Steve won’t soften the story in his clinical review at this stage. He admits the outcome of his response was “horrible.” But if you can’t learn lessons from what you’ve done wrong, that Old Man never goes away.
“I made a decision then that I needed to change in that area,” Silver says. “I said, to myself ‘You know what, Steve? This is a no-win, decade-long battle. You are much better off going with her attitude than yours on this. Number one, it’s going to dramatically improve your marriage if you stop fi ghting this fi ght. Number two, she’s probably more right in this than you are, because by being overly generous with our family, we’re not going to go broke and the chances are it will make our whole life that much nicer.’ I chose almost three years ago to go that route, and I haven’t looked back. It was a big deal—a big deal.”
Read & download the full article here