The Day I Threw the Muffin, and Other Sad Money Arguments

Filed in archive Marriage and Finance on May 7, 2007

I came upon three different articles blog posts today that led to my upcoming confession. I'll point you to the others first:

First, Amy Baldwin of the Charlotte Observer had this piece on the diasagreement she and her husband have over whether to pay someone to clean their house.

Then, Money Under 30 offered some advice on finances while living together unmarried.

Finally, the Dinks had some unhappiness over the price of a chair.

Here's my first story related to these posts. For the sake of brevity, I'll save my other story for another blog post.

After my wife and I were first married, I secured my first full-time job, while she quit her full-time job to go back to school for her MBA. Money was tight. Very much so, as we had also just bought a house. A cheap house, but nevertheless it was our first mortgage and now we were paying it from one not-so-excellent income.

One day while I was at work my new wife made some blueberry muffins. When I got home I was having one while she told me a story about a pair of shoes she had bought. When I found out how much they cost, I got a little angry. Not totally angry, just a little perturbed, in that I felt like she had the opportunity to go back to school like she wanted while I worked to support her and our new mortgage, not to mention the cat.

What set me off, though, was the fact that I felt like she didn't care that I was annoyed. As if I was being crazy. In retrospect I think she just didn't like that I was mad and so she was hoping to get off the subject, but I took this to mean that not only did she buy an expensive pair of shoes while we had no money, but that she thought I was being silly and that she just might go out and do it again if the situation arose.

I felt my point was not getting across. So I took the blueberry muffin and threw it as hard as I could at the floor, which of course broke it into several pieces and left some blueberry spatters here and there. My wife likes to refer to this fight as "the time you threw the muffin at me," but in truth I threw the muffin down, not at her. I just couldn't think of any other way to get her attention, and to get her to take my concerns seriously.

The muffin toss got her attention, but I wouldn't recommend this as a method for settling financial disputes.