This week’s Cheaper Than Therapy is a little special: Lonely Money is a fictional short story, one I’ve needed to tell for a long time. To read it, you can become a Cheaper Than Therapy subscriber for $5 a month. Lonely Money is fiction, and any similarities to real life or real people are entirely coincidental.
Introduction
If I’m bleeding, I go to the hospital. People there can fix the problem, my insurance bills them later. If they don’t fix me, or if they fix me wrong, there are professional consequences for sewing my arm to my abdomen or whatever. If I’m thirsty, I walk into a bodega and buy a bottle of water, and when I open that bottle, there’s water in it. I get my money back if it’s empty instead. You can’t buy not being single anymore, but for a very long time I refused to believe it.
Eleven years alone, searching and longing. That’s a long time to long. So I tried to connect a perceived problem with a perceived solution, and found countless ways to do that—at a variety of price points. All of them cost, none of them worked, and my self trust, along with a significant amount of my life savings, fell away from me irreparably, like dropping your phone in a river. People have done far more desperate things in the name of love than deplete their bank accounts. Please don’t judge me. I was bleeding.