Free The Antelope in the Living Room: The Real Story of Two People Sharing One Life by Melanie Shankle

most of my early twenties with the security of knowing the bank just took money out of my dad’s account whenever my personal account ran out of money.
    (Listen, I’m not proud. But I was in my early twenties, and nobody ever talks about how smart people in their twenties are.)
    But once Perry and I got married and took on this mortgage for our cute cottage house, a new financial day dawned. We no longer had disposable income to spend on things like cute tops from Banana Republic. And Perry has always loved himself a new shirt from Banana. Or maybe that’s me. Either way.
    On a related note, I got my first bonus from my new job in pharmaceutical sales after Perry and I had been married about three months, and I promptly drove to Ann Taylor and blew the whole thing on this red wool suit because WE WERE RICH. Except we absolutely were not. I had no business spending that money on a suit, but I felt like I deserved it. And it was red! And the jacket was a peacoat! And it looked just like something Rachel would wear on Friend s !
    Justification is a delicate art form.
    I still own that suit, by the way. Not that I will ever wear it again, because the skirt is short enough to offend Kim Kardashian, but I felt so grown up when I bought it. It was like I had arrived, with my wool suit with shoulder pads. And also like we’d have to eat ramen noodles for several weeks until we both got paid again.
    Anyway, it appeared that, based on our premarital counseling, responsible married couples are supposed to sit down with theircheckbook and have meetings wherein they create a budget using a pie chart. And we tried to do that, but it just made us both hungry for pie.
    The truth is, we are not now, nor have we ever been, good budgeters. Perry and I both tend to have a little bit of an impulsive personality: act first, think later. This makes us fun at parties but not the people you want in charge of anything you actually care about. The difference between us is that I will later toss and turn all night worrying that we might end up living on the street, whereas Perry always believes everything is going to be just fine.
    I’d always heard that the two biggest issues in marriage tend to be finances and in-laws, but it wasn’t until we bought our house and really had to watch how we spent our money that I realized how true that was. And the problem was, whenever we had a little money left over to spend on something frivolous, you could guarantee we’d never agree on how to spend it.
    What? We could put it in savings?
    How is that fun?
    Perry was happy with the entertainment center we’d inherited from his grandfather. Why on earth did we need to buy an armoire for our TV? And I didn’t feel like a game feeder on the back of Perry’s truck was a necessary expense. Why do you need a contraption to throw corn out on the road while you hunt? Isn’t that why God gave us hands?
    Gulley and her husband, who were much more financially responsible than we were, had devised a system where they each got a certain amount of “mad money” every month that they could spend on whatever they wanted. Perry and I agreed that seemed like a good idea, so we attempted to emulate the mad-money idea   —with little to no success. Mainly because neither of us reallyagreed on what were necessary expenses versus frivolous expenses. My makeup was necessary. As were new jeans. And he maintained that hunting gear was essential to our survival since it put food on our table. Which, technically, is true. What I questioned was whether buying six flashlights from a company called Cheaper Than Dirt! constituted hunting gear.
    (I told Perry I wrote this, and he said I need to quit telling people he shops at Cheaper Than Dirt! He said that’s like if he told people I buy all my jewelry off QVC.)
    (It’s fascinating that he didn’t want to get into a debate over whether or not he bought six flashlights at one time because . . . GUILTY. He just wants to clarify