Food, Home and Style

Laid-Off & Looking: Is It OK to Be a Gold-Digger?

In early January 2009, I figured it was time for my guy to meet my mom. It had been seven months and she was beginning to think that I had something to hide. (I didn’t, but before him, I’d been single for six years. I put this relationship at a speed somewhere between frozen turtle and crawling backwards.) He picked out a nice seafood restaurant and I’m pretty sure (from what I haven’t blocked out) that I spent a good deal of the evening wishing for more Tanqueray (as I was cut off… evil people in this world).

Everything was going pretty well until my mother (whom I love—with clenched teeth) brought up a very touchy topic for me. She asked him if his family would think that I’m a gold digger (or GD). She asked him that, upon their first meeting, at dinner, while I was trapped in a booth with an empty tumbler. I don’t recall the rest of the evening. I simply remember being embarrassed.

I won’t lie, I’ve thought about it. I’ve thought about how his daughter would feel about a less-than-wealthy woman (9 years her senior) hanging out with her not-close-to-broke dad. In fact, I thought about it when we first met. I was a service writer at the shop where he brought his company vehicle to be serviced. I bet he probably was aware of my average salary.

When we went out to dinner for the first time, we went to a tapas lounge. I got there before him and outside of work it was obvious that he had a lot going on for him. Since I worked around cars, I could tell by his keychain that he owned multiple nice cars, but I refrained from saying anything (lest I have to mention “The Blackmobile”, my ’94 Probe). When we went out to our cars (I was rollin’ in mom’s ’07 Maxima) he asked me what I thought of his Windstar. I told him that it looked nicer than my car. That’s when he let me in on the “secret” that his own cars were a Yukon and BMW. (I felt really poor when I went home that night.) He used this as a gauge for women and how gold-diggerish they were (I guess I passed)…

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–Written by Symian for YourTango.com

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Tags: gold-diggers, relationships