Advice columnist, author, advocate and founder of the “It Gets Better” campaign, Dan Savage writes openly and frankly about sex and sexuality, but what’s the one thing he hates talking about? Money.
In the latest episode of WNYC’s Death, Sex & Money, Savage sat down with host Anna Sale to discuss the challenges of raising a teenager, difficulties relating to his own father, and of course how he and his husband Terry deal with their finances.
Here are some excerpts from the interview:
On the money being a point of tension in his marriage to his husband Terry:
Dan Savage: But money is our biggest fault line in our relationship. We still fight about money, we fight about money constantly, ’cause Terry enjoys spending money. And I don’t enjoy seeing money spent. Terry is a collector. Terry has a massive record collection that’s always growing, and I look at it and think, if I outlive you, what am I gonna do with all of these records? And when is enough? Like, you have more records than you could listen to in 10 years, if you sat on the living room floor just playing your vinyl. It would take you 10 years to listen to every single one of them, and you’re not going to do that. And I don’t have that gene, I don’t understand that desire to possess a thing that has no real use or meaning. But I own three pairs of shoes and Terry owns 50 pairs of shoes. And we’re just different people that way. Different also in that I have paid for every single pair of shoes in our house but I only can wear three of them. So if Terry hears this he’s gonna be really mad. He doesn’t like me to talk about it…This is what we fight about — we don’t fight about sex, he can have an affair and that would not be a problem for me. But we will fight when I’m home for a week and every day that I’m home, a UPS truck comes by with a package with shoes or clothes or records in it. Which happens. And we have massive, huge arguments about it.
On feeling uncomfortable talking about money:
DS: What makes me uncomfortable to talk about? Money makes me uncomfortable to talk about. My parents were poor and they had four kids in Catholic school and braces all at once, and there was never any money. We didn’t own the house we lived in. And things were always really tight and harrowing. So even to this day, I have hangups about money and tension about money. And spending I have a hard time with.
On the role shift as his son DJ got older:
DS: When D.J. was young, Terry was the stay-at-home dad, and whatever Terry says goes. Terry made the rules. And that’s a role Terry is most comfortable with, being the boss. And now that D.J.’s a teenager, 16 years old, almost 17, you don’t dictate to a teenager. You can’t ground a 16-year-old successfully. You have to negotiate with a teenager. You have to reason with a teenager. And Terry’s not good at that. And I am…So now that D.J.’s a teenager, we have this rapport, he and I, about negotiation. About talking things out, about reason, that he and Terry right now don’t have.
On having trouble relating to his father:
DS: We have a difficult relationship, or a relationship complicated by politics. He’s one of those guys, 70-year-old guys who sits in front of his television set in Arizona in retirement watching Fox News. But he’s a good guy and a fun guy and I enjoy talking to him when we talk, we’re not the closest, but that’s life. I guess. I don’t even know how to talk about it. I don’t want to disrespect my dad. But we never really clicked. I was estranged from my father for many years because I was gay. That estrangement didn’t make me gay. I was a little faggot, I was a sissy, I couldn’t play baseball, I liked musicals. I was effeminate. And that was embarrassing to my Irish Catholic cop dad. He loved me, but you could see that it was a bit more of an effort to love me? Than it was to love my brothers. And that — sensing that kind of rejection as a child, you react to it, defensively, you meet it with a little bit of rejection of your own. And it’s taken a lot of effort on both of our parts to overcome that. His rejection of me, as subtle as it was, as a child — and of course I picked up on it and my reaction, rejecting him as an adolescent.
For the whole interview go to: http://www.wnyc.org/story/dan-savage-thinks-infidelity-could-save-your-relationship/
