Money is great. Money provides freedom. But you will always regret sacrificing love for money. When you get older, you will realize how true this statement really is if you haven’t found someone.

Life is simply not as fun if you don’t have someone to share it with. Further, finding “the one” might also want you to start a family. Not that everybody should have kids. Just know finding love is a huge catalyst for wanting to bring life on Earth.

Here’s a story from my friend about her regrets sacrificing love for money and career. Before you make any decision, go through a regret minimization exercise to help you make better choices.

You Will Always Regret Sacrificing Love For Money

My old boss, let’s call her Lana, who is now my friend, invited me to her house party. It wasn’t her house, but her new boyfriend’s house. I was thrilled for her because, at 54, she had gone most of her post-college life without a steady boyfriend.

She graduated with honors from Columbia University and then received her MBA from Dartmouth. For the next 30 years, she worked 60+ hours a week to climb the ranks at Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, and then Morgan Stanley.

In 2002, at age 37, she made Managing Director and continues to be a big wig on Wall Street today. I wouldn’t be surprised if she regularly clears at least $1.25 million dollars a year.

When I first met Lana, she was the most focused and intense woman I had ever met.

Even after going through 50+ interviews with various people on the floor and interviewing with her twice, she still wanted to interview me one last time over coffee. She was meticulous. She also correctly suspected I was a misfit who might not fit the firm’s culture.

Although she grilled me like a wagyu burger, we became friends. I think our common heritage helped us connect.

Never Could Quite Find Love Early

She would tell me about her ski trips to Whistler or to the Swiss Alps where she randomly met some guy. She always beamed with joy when she talked about her encounters.

Every time she told me of her adventures, she’d shed her image of the hard-charging Vice President and become like a school girl falling in love for the first time.

After one trip, I remember her telling me she’d met a Tunisian gentleman, whom I immediately started referring to him as “The Tasmanian,” an ode to the Tasmanian Devil who had swept her off her feet. She was thrilled.

Unfortunately, that relationship lasted for only six months because it was too hard to maintain a long-distance relationship.

For the first year in retirement, I murmured this phrase over and over again, “I’m bored.” After regularly working 60 hours a week and interacting with clients, I suddenly had too much time on my hands. Instead of being bored, maybe what I really felt was loneliness.

After my wife took the bus to work at 8:30 am each morning I was left twiddling my thumbs. After 13 years of working in finance, I had been accustomed to waking up by 5:30 am. So I spent my time writing while she was sleeping instead of writing while she was away.

The vast majority of my friends couldn’t play tennis or hang out during the day because they had jobs. Therefore, there was a constant struggle to fight FOMO as they went on to do bigger and better things. Eventually, I found more productive things to do by consulting for startups.

The pandemic seems to have exacerbated the loneliness epidemic as more people distance themselves from others. Here’s the data to prove it.

I’ve got some exciting news folks! Over the past 16 months, I’ve been in talks with a couple executives at Netflix about a potential new show. They only live 50 minutes south of me in Los Gatos. Today, I’m proud to announce I’ll be producing a new Netflix original series called Love Is Money!

The idea came about when I was chilling alone in my hot tub one day. It’s my regular sanctuary where I think of new post ideas, read, skim through social media, and meditate.

A friend of mine, let’s call her Sarah, confided in me during the pandemic that her love for her husband was waning. Sarah was 34 at the time and doing really well in her career, but her husband was not.

As her husband’s company’s stock price floundered, so did their hopes of buying a $3.8 million dream house to raise their growing family in the expensive Bay Area. Sarah was pregnant with their second and both of them wanted to upgrade to a new home.

Sarah asked me, “Sam, is it weird I find him to be a little less tolerable every time his company’s stock declines by another 10%? I used to put up with him being a slob, but no more!“

It was then that I realized love often isn’t blind, nor pure. Instead, the amount of love you have for someone may be highly correlated with the amount of money they have. Hence, a new show and relationship experiment is born! It’ll actually even have Asian folks in it too!

There are two common ways to marry. You can marry your equal or you can marry rich. In my opinion, marrying your equal is better than marrying rich.

There’s just something to be said about starting from nothing and getting wealthy together. It’s harder to appreciate sudden wealth, especially if you didn’t earn it. Further, it is extremely gratifying to go through struggle and build significant wealth together.

At 45, I’m starting to see more relationships fall apart than begin. But for those that are still lasting, the one constant seems to be that each partner is fairly equal in accomplishment. And that accomplishment isn’t limited to money.

People with similar levels of accomplishment tend to be of similar age, income, education, wealth, and/or experience.

Among the many reasons why people break up, a lack of respect might be reason #1 followed by resentment as a close #2.

Let’s say you’re more accomplished than your partner. You may start to feel you’re losing respect for them if you catch them lounging around too often instead of hustling to get to a top level in something, anything.

If you’re the partner who is lounging around, you may start resenting your partner for being so demanding, especially if they are much older than you. Why be so successful if you can’t enjoy the benefits? You start rationalizing to yourself.

The physical passion only burns for so long until substance takes over. Over time, it’s also easy to take each other for granted.