For the Love of Money: On Men, Women, Fearlessness, and the Almighty Dollar

Men and their money were all over the news this week, including Exxon chair Lee Raymond's $400 million dollar retirement package (that's a hell of a gold watch!) and Dick Cheney's $8.82 million adjusted gross income and $1.9 million IRS refund (to be fair, the Cheneys did donate over $6 million to charity, including $2.7 million to the Richard B. and Lynne V. Cheney Cardiovascular Institute at George Washington University Medical School -- which, for a man with the Veep's medical history, seems less like charity and more like insurance).

I've been thinking about the very special relationship men have with money a lot lately, as I'm working on the part of my book that deals with the incredibly different ways men and women deal with what the Ojays called "the mean, mean green" in their soul classic "For the Love of Money."

For instance, men are genetically hardwired to love money. And it really doesn't seem to matter how they get it. They love money they earn, they love money they inherit, they love money they steal, they love money they win at the racetrack or in Vegas, they love money they find on the street. The only kind of money it seems that they have an aversion to is money that belongs to a woman.

Sad but true. A study last year found that, as the New York Times put it, men would rather marry "their secretaries than their bosses."

This is perplexing because men are supposed to be all about problem-solving and efficiency. If you love women and you love money, then wouldn't a woman with money be a two-fer, like one of those phone/MP3 players? So why does money enhance the male ego in one instance but diminish it in another?

Maybe it's because money usually is accompanied by power and confidence, which surprisingly few men are used to dealing with when it's coming at them instead of from them.

Here are a few excerpts from my take on becoming fearless with money. Once again, please send me your stories of fear and fearlessness or of your journey from one to the other. And please let me know if I can use them in the book.

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Women, money and work -- talk about a triangulated relationship. Money is, of course, inextricably tied up with work. It's what we get in return for our labor, it's how we pay our bills, it's what we devote an enormous share of our lives to. And, yes, that's all true for everybody. But for women there's an added twist: how to earn what we're worth in a world that's content to pay us 76 cents to a man's dollar.

Women MUST overcome their money worries because, as Galia Gichon, a financial advisor who owns the consulting company Down to Earth Finance, said at a financial seminar for women, "We're making less, we're working less, but we're living longer... we're going to need more money for retirement."

Unfortunately, it's not just a simple matter of asking for what you want. Men are conditioned from a young age to go after what they want. Not only are they rewarded by actually getting what they ask for, they're also rewarded, in a larger sense, for even asking. Not so with women.

Women are made to feel guilty when they ask -- or, God forbid, demand -- what they feel they're entitled to. As Gichon puts it, "We sort of let ourselves be told what we're worth instead of just stating very directly and confidently what we feel we deserve." Making demands is not considered "ladylike." The problem is, waiting to be given what you deserve usually means you'll never get what you deserve.

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Money is, of course, about money. But it's also often a stand-in for so many other fears. For both genders, money is symbolic of so much in our culture and our lives. But it's also true that women have a very different relationship to money than men do.

Writer Carol Hoenig knows this well. Now a novelist and blogger, she told me that financial dependence was one of the things that kept her in an unhappy marriage. "Eighteen months after we were married, we began our family and I was a stay-at-home mom. Over the years, when I wanted more from my marriage, there was the consistent threat that if I wasn't happy, I could move out. Because I did not work outside the home I had few options and he took comfort in that. It's easy to keep someone under your control when you bring home the money."

Eventually, she decided to pursue her own interests and went back to school -- which changed everything. "I always enjoyed writing but never dared believe that I could make a living at it, until I took a number of college courses and was given encouragement by my professors. I then got a part-time job working in a bookstore that immediately promoted me to full-time. While my children were growing up, I was too. My writing and my career were empowering me. And finally, I acknowledged the fact that my husband was not invested in the marriage and he never would be. I was also becoming stronger as a person and realized that I would be happier on my own."

I also saw a similar dynamic in my mother's relationship to my father, although with her innate fearlessness, she did not let financial concerns stop her from leaving him when I was 11 years old. For my father, as for many Greek men of his generation, there was nothing wrong with extramarital affairs. "I don't want you to interfere with my private life," I remember him telling my mother when she complained. His marriage was part of his public life, his affairs part of his private life. But that was not okay for her, and even though she had no job and no obvious way to earn money she took her two children and left and trusted that somehow she would make ends meet. And somehow she did.

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But fearlessness about money isn't just about having money. Which is to say, having a lot of money doesn't necessarily mean you've conquered your fears surrounding money. Poverty consciousness is the fear that no matter how much wealth you have, it's never enough. Some of the richest women I know are still driven by a fear of ending up as bag ladies.

Ariel Capital Management President Mellody Hobson is a remarkable success story: At 37, she's one of the wealthiest and most influential African-American women in the country. "I'll always be thankful for what I've been given," she told me. But a tumultuous, financially unstable home life as a child instilled in her a fear of being penniless, a fear that's been both a positive motivation and a source of constant anxiety.

But even now, she wonders, "What if I screw up and lose everything? What is the amount of money that would make me comfortable? And my number is always much higher than my friends!" When she could, she'd even pay her phone bill and mortgage for an entire year. "So if everything goes wrong, I'd at least have a phone and a place to live!"

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My mother taught my sister and me all about abundance -- that it has to do more with your state of mind than your actual bank balance. And she demonstrated this state even when we could barely scrape enough money together to pay the rent. She was constantly living in a state of offering. Food, of course, was her favorite thing to offer, but it was a metaphor for so much else. I'm convinced that she absolutely believed that something terrible would happen to her children -- and her grandchildren and her friends -- if they went 20 minutes without eating. And nobody could ring our doorbell -- whether the Federal Express man or a parent dropping off a child for a play date -- without being asked, indeed urged, to sit down and try whatever she's cooking in the kitchen. And nobody could leave our house without goody bags filled with food.