I wrote about stuff like this back in 2015 or so, but think on it — >
- Failure happens almost every day (second?) in human existence.
- Sex is what creates you, and honestly, it’s tied to levels of happiness within relationships.
- Money dictates the type of life you can have.
Now, some families are super functional and discuss all this above very openly.
Most families? You’d never be discussing any of the three. Typically we bury failure, we slap kids for talking about sex, and money is a gauche discussion.
I grew up never really talking about any of these three. I’m 38 and haven’t really accomplished that much in my days. Correlation? Probably.
So what’s this about compensation and sex?
Well, think about it — >
- Sex is really important to relationships, but it’s not actively discussed. I’ve told this story in other blogs, but one time right before I got divorced, I hit this text thread of my guy friends and I’m like “How many times a week do you guys have sex?” They’re all married save for one person, so about seven possible responses. I got zero. The comment sat there like a brick for 23 hours and then someone messaged about the NBA. Whew! But seriously, people don’t talk about sex that much, largely because of how their families raised them around sex, and yet, it’s a really important topic.
- Salaries? We almost never discuss salaries. Pay transparency is a complete joke, especially in America. I actually — no joke here — know couples who are raising kids together whereby each member of the couple does not disclose their salary to the other. Like, WTF? You need to know how much is coming in, right? And this is someone you took vows with? But they still don’t do it, man. They don’t — and again, probably goes back to how they were raised around money.
So we’ve got these two important things, that determine a lot — quality of relationship, actual procreation of you into the world, how much you can afford, where you can live, where your kids might go to school, what vacations you can take, etc. — and we barely discuss either basically at all.
That seemed fucked up to anyone?
There’s another parallel on sex and compensation, too
People get racy with it all the time. See also — >
- “She slept with him?” is akin to “He makes how much?”
- “He’s bad in bed” would be akin to “His salary is way overblown”
- “I don’t know, it just happened” is, ironically, how most people’s salaries seem to be determined
- There are probably a few other wording parallels here that I’m too lazy to find
If you want some more on this, Lance Haun has a newsletter — used to work with him at a place that also doesn’t openly discuss salaries — and he linked a good podcast where Jason Fried, the CEO of Basecamp who gets quoted in biz journalism all the time, talks about compensation at length. It doesn’t overtly get sexual (oooh, spicy) but it’s a good talk regardless.
What’s your take on all this stuff we don’t discuss but should?
20 years ago a recruiter blurted out the following to me: “We ladies can talk about our orgasms, but not about money. Weird.”
She didn’t get fired because 1) it’s way harder than that to offend me and 2) it was 1999, and things were different (for better or worse). But that stayed with me. It’s the question that taps me on the shoulder whenever I get squirmy talking about money. It’s been an incredibly useful question.
That’s a really good analogy.