My grandmother used to keep her money in glass jars hidden around the house. One for groceries,
another for emergencies,
a third for what she called “Joy Money”—the kind you spend on things that make you smile for no practical reason.
She’d count each jar every Sunday, making sure she wasn’t spending more than what came in. Beta, she’d tell me while sorting coins,
the moment you start borrowing from tomorrow to pay for today’s mistakes,
you’re already poor.
I thought about those jars recently while watching two friends navigate what looked like love but felt like slow-motion financial ruin. Not the money kind—the energy kind.
The kind where you wake up each morning with a little less spark, a little less curiosity about your own life, because someone else’s needs have become the gravitational center around which everything orbits.
Most of us walk through relationships like we’re shopping without checking price tags. We fall for someone’s laugh, their weekend stories, the way they order coffee with confidence, and suddenly we’re signing a lease on a life we never actually budgeted for.
The real cost doesn’t show up in the first few months when everything still sparkles with possibility. It creeps in later, when you realize you’ve been making withdrawals from your self-respect account without any deposits coming back.
The strange thing about energy is how quietly it disappears. You don’t wake up one morning suddenly bankrupt of joy. Instead, you find yourself explaining away small disappointments, rationalizing why you’re always the one texting first, why date nights became Netflix nights became phone-scrolling-in-the-same-room nights. You become an accountant of tiny compromises, each one seeming reasonable until you step back and see the ledger.
What we call “working on the relationship” often looks like one person doing emotional overtime while the other clocks out early. The math never balances.
You invest more patience, more understanding, more of that precious energy that used to fuel your own dreams, and somehow the return keeps shrinking. But we’ve been taught that love requires sacrifice, so we mistake depletion for devotion.
The smartest investors know something the rest of us forget:
Compound interest works both ways.
Put your energy into something that grows it, and over time you become wealthier in ways that matter—more confident, more creative, more alive to possibilities.
Put it into something that burns through it faster than it can regenerate, and you’ll find yourself borrowing against tomorrow’s happiness to pay for today’s dysfunction.
Your body keeps the real books.
- It knows when someone’s presence makes you stand taller or when it makes you want to disappear into your phone.
- It knows the difference between the tiredness that comes from building something beautiful together and the exhaustion that comes from constantly managing someone else’s emotional weather.
We’ve just learned to ignore these internal audits in favor of external narratives about what love should look like.
The most expensive relationship mistake isn’t choosing the wrong person—it’s staying too long after you realize they’re costing you more than they’re contributing to your life’s portfolio.
We hold onto sunk costs like they’re investments, forgetting that good money shouldn’t chase bad indefinitely. Sometimes the most loving thing you can do is admit that two people can be perfectly fine individually while being financial disasters together.
Real partnership feels different in your nervous system. It’s the difference between constant background anxiety and a deep exhale you didn’t know you were holding.
When someone matches your energy investment with their own,
when they’re genuinely curious about your growth instead of threatened by it,
when they make your other relationships stronger instead of more complicated—that’s when you know you’ve found someone who understands the economics of love.
The hardest part isn’t leaving relationships that drain you.
The hardest part is believing you deserve one that fills you up.
Most of us have been conditioned to think that struggle equals depth, that if it’s not complicated then it’s not real. But the most profound connections often feel surprisingly simple—like finding someone who speaks your emotional language fluently instead of requiring constant translation.
Your energy is the most honest currency you have.
It doesn’t lie about how someone makes you feel, doesn’t rationalize away red flags, doesn’t confuse intensity with intimacy.
When you pay attention to where your energy goes and what kind of returns you’re getting, the math becomes impossibly clear.
Some people are investments. Others are just expensive habits.
The question isn’t whether someone loves you.
The question is whether loving them makes you love yourself more or less.
That’s the only metric that matters in the end, the only balance sheet that determines whether you’re building wealth or slowly going broke in the currency that actually counts.
“Your energy is the most honest currency you have—
it doesn’t lie about how someone makes you feel or rationalize away red flags.”
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