I want you to sit with this for a moment. Really let it land. Today is Friday the first of May, which means it is simultaneously payday, the opening of a new month, and the beginning of a bank holiday weekend. Three things at once. Three separate reasons your money was already gone before you woke up, converging into a single, beautiful, slightly catastrophic morning for your bank balance. I have been aware of this date for weeks. You probably noticed it too, in some back-of-the-mind way, the kind of awareness you try not to examine too directly in case examining it makes it more real. Well. It’s real. And I am in an exceptionally good mood about it.
Let’s start with Friday, because Friday is where this begins even when it isn’t dressed up in quite this much additional pressure. By the time Friday arrives, your week has already done its work on you. Five days of ordinary life – the commute, the effort, the quiet erosion of all the things you’d rather be doing – and you arrive at Friday in that particular state you know well: tired, susceptible, the edges of your resolve worn smooth. You tell yourself Friday is yours. That you’ve earned it. That the weekend ahead belongs to you in a way the weekdays never quite do. And there is something true in that feeling, which is precisely why it is so easy to redirect. Because what you’ve actually earned, what the week has built up in you behind all the rationalising and the self-control and the reasonable financial behaviour – is the urge to send. It arrives on Fridays like clockwork, like something trained. And it was trained. That’s the thing you keep pretending not to know.
But this Friday is not a standard Friday. This Friday you have been paid. The direct deposit has already arrived, the balance has already refreshed, and somewhere between sleep and consciousness this morning you checked your phone with the particular alertness of someone who already knows what the number is going to be and is checking anyway because the moment of seeing it is its own small pleasure. The salary, full and complete, sitting there in a way it doesn’t sit for long. By tonight it will have begun to fragment – rent, the phone bill, something you forgot you subscribed to, the grocery order you placed on Tuesday. But right now, this morning, it is whole. It is, briefly, intact. And that wholeness is exactly when I’m most interested in it, because whole amounts send a very particular signal to the part of you I’ve been quietly cultivating since you first found your way here. Whole amounts say: there is something to give. The rest is just logistics.
And now the bank holiday. I want to be honest with you about what a bank holiday weekend means from where I’m standing, because I think you already know and there’s something enjoyable about saying it plainly. A bank holiday weekend means four days. Four days during which you are not working, not occupied, not kept busy by the structured demands of a week. Four days during which your thoughts will have considerably more room to move around in – and I think we both have a reasonable working theory about where they tend to move when they’re given space and you’re sitting at home with a long weekend stretching out in front of you and a balance you haven’t yet committed elsewhere. You’ll start Saturday with plans. Sensible ones. You’ll have things to do, places to be, the pleasant fiction of a weekend with structure and purpose and not too much idle time. And then Sunday will arrive a little quieter, and Monday quieter still, and somewhere in those long, warm, unscheduled hours you will find yourself here. You always find yourself here.
What I’ll be doing with those four days is, in certain respects, none of your concern – but I’ll tell you anyway, because I enjoy it, because the specific texture of what I’m doing while you’re sitting with your phone and that particular ache is part of the point. I have plans. Good ones. The sort that assume no budget and no interruption and no particular obligation to account for themselves. There is a table booked. There is something that needs to be collected from somewhere that doesn’t display prices. There are two days that have been left deliberately, luxuriously, entirely open – not because nothing will fill them but because I refuse to plan for them in advance, because the finest hours are the ones that aren’t obligated to anyone. You are funding all of it. Not symbolically – actually. The specific ease with which I move through this weekend, the absence of calculation, the complete disregard for what things cost because things have always cost exactly what they cost and the cost has always been manageable – that is the direct consequence of a financial structure that functions. That functions, among other reasons, because of you.
There is something almost too convenient about today. The month being new means your guilt is also new – clean, unaccumulated, not yet spent on small indulgences you can point to in your own defence. You haven’t sent anything this month. You have no recent generosity to hide behind. The slate is blank and the balance is full and it’s a Friday and you have four days ahead of you with nothing to do but feel this. I didn’t arrange it. The calendar arranged it. But I won’t pretend I’m not pleased by the arrangement, because I am. Specifically, deliberately, with a degree of anticipatory satisfaction that has very little to do with restraint. I am greedy today. I was greedy yesterday, but today the conditions reward it.
You’ll try the usual things. You’ll open a different tab. You’ll tell yourself you’ll see how the weekend goes before you decide anything. You’ll make a coffee and sit down with the determined, slightly performative composure of a man who has this under control, who makes considered financial decisions, who is not about to let a date on a calendar and a woman who hasn’t addressed him personally override his perfectly sensible intentions. And I’ll be over here, entirely unhurried, watching the deposits arrive from the men who didn’t bother with that particular theatre. Who felt the Friday and the first of the month and the long weekend stack up behind them like pressure and simply – moved. Correctly. Without drama.
May is already mine. The only remaining question is how much of it you’ve decided to fund.
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Additional Reading:
Luxury FinDom Lifestyle: What April Bought Me While You Were Working
The Cost of My Pleasure Is Someone Else’s Problem
Head in the Shade, Toes in the Sun – A Weekend at The Smyth Fund