My best friend is, by almost every possible definition, a gold digger. I say this with love.
She is actually a very loving person. We’ve helped each other through some genuinely difficult times, and I’ve never been rich, yet somehow I’m still her best friend, which I think proves that she does, in fact, have a heart.
But whenever a man has money, she suddenly becomes an economist, a psychologist, and a trauma specialist at the same time. She can spend half an hour explaining why she is attracted to someone, and somehow the explanation will travel through his personality, her childhood wounds, attachment patterns, emotional safety, and eventually, very gracefully, land on the fact that he is rich.
The other day she was doing it again, and I finally couldn’t take it anymore. I poked her and said, “Oh my god, stop lying to me and to yourself. Just admit you’re a gold digger.” It really hurt her so immediately she fought back: “You’re worse. You’re a meaning digger.” I fake-laughed for maybe half a second and then I stopped. Because I think she saw something.
I’ve always been very sure that I’m not a gold digger. Money has had surprisingly little emotional effect on me throughout different periods of my life. But give me access to someone’s inner world—their old writing, the books that changed them, an embarrassing belief they had at twenty-one, a strange object they carried during the worst year of their life, some contradiction they don’t quite know how to explain—and suddenly I become completely awake.
I want to know everything, and in some ways, that might be worse. Money is external. You can lose it and make more. You can inherit it, spend it, give it away, earn it back. But a person only has one lived history. One childhood. One version of themselves at twenty-one. One particular chain of memories, wounds, mistakes, old beliefs, and forgotten selves that produced the person sitting in front of you now.
That thought made me a little sad. Because there is something almost predatory hidden inside a desire that, from the inside, feels very much like love.
There is a difference between finding someone’s inner world beautiful and needing them to remain complicated because their complexity makes your own world more interesting; there is even a difference between loving someone and loving what happens inside your own mind when you encounter them.
That last one bothers me the most.I know how much I love meaning-making. I can take something very small and build an entire private mythology around it. Sometimes the mythology becomes so beautiful that I have to stop and ask myself whether I am still looking at the person who gave me the original material.
So no, I don’t think I’m a meaning digger. At least not in the way I accused my friend of being a gold digger. But I understand now why her accusation stopped me. Because this is probably where I am most capable of becoming dishonest with myself.
And that is a good enough reason to pay attention.