My income over the previous twelve months was, in fact, higher than his salary. This is not something I had said to him, because I had not wanted to make a point of it and because the comparison is not the point. The point is not who earns more. The point is that we are a two-income household and we have been a two-income household for two years and the household runs on both incomes and both incomes are real and professionally generated.
He looked at the numbers for a while.
“I told my family we were managing on mine,” he said.
“I know.”
“We are very much not managing on mine.”
“No,” I said.
“If anything, we’re managing on yours more than mine.”
“I don’t want to make it about that,” I said. “The point is that we’re managing on both, and that was always true, and that’s the accurate description.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then he said: “I need to think about what it means that I told them that story when I knew the numbers.”
“Yes,” I said. “You do.”
He thought about it. Not right then — right then we moved on to a conversation about our actual budgeting — but in the weeks after, in sessions with Dr. Watts and in conversations at home, he did what he said he would do. He thought about what it meant that he had known the numbers and told a different story. He did not arrive at comfortable conclusions. He arrived at honest ones.