Dear Prudence,
I’m in my mid-thirties (female) and have a large group of friends from a mutual hobby. “Sarah” (a few years my junior) joined us about a year and a half ago and is a well-established member of the group now. I like her and appreciate having another smart, successful, and confident woman in the mix, but have closer friends. Lately, I have been struggling with Sarah’s attitude toward spending and love of luxury items. Sarah is an engineer and makes a lot of money, which is great! She was also married for a time to a very, very wealthy man. Sarah enjoys spending money on designer clothes and expensive jewelry, which is her business of course, but I find myself rolling my eyes when she speaks about her purchases. She went on a trip to NYC recently and spent a lot of money on designer shoes and a new necklace from a famous high-end jeweler. While she has not talked ad nauseum about the purchases by any means, she’s brought them up a handful of times, and points out the designer of her shoes when she wears them and is complimented on them and mentions how much she enjoyed going to the store and being surrounded by beautiful things. I have heard three times now the story about how when she went into the jeweler’s, she was told by the salesperson, after affirming that it was her first time buying from them, how much she would love the necklace she bought, only to retort that they had misunderstood; she’d been bought many of their pieces, this was only her first time buying for herself.
This is her money, but I am a teacher who grew up in severe poverty and just has a different attitude toward spending. I don’t want those things, frankly, and struggle not to find such excessive spending frivolous and tasteless with everything going on in the world. While Sarah definitely has enough money to buy expensive things and still donate to people in war-torn countries, and may well have for all I know, to flaunt such spending right now seems off. Sometimes when she mentions her big shopping vacation, I find myself thinking about how many classroom supplies these things would buy, or about my students who, like me at that age, might not have enough food at home. I am especially put off by the story that is intended to inform the listener about how many pieces of very expensive jewelry Sarah owns. The anecdote probably would have settled better if I had heard it once, but it doesn’t improve with retelling. It all just seems so very superficial, and I enjoy parts of her personality much better and I wish I could focus more on them, and might be able to if she just wore her shoes without mentioning who made them. What can I do here? I don’t want to be snarky or mean, but I really hate all the shopping talk and find myself starting to wish Sarah wasn’t at so many group functions.
— Holly Go-Anywhere Else