The blogosphere is a buzz with this (relatively) new New York Times article on men, women, expectations, dating, and money. Or, most specifically, the expectations that higher-paid women have about dating men who earn less than they do.
I don’t know if I have anything good to add on to the discussion (see here & here).
All I have to say is, I never want to fight about money with someone I love. I think it can bring out the worst in us, dragging out issues that might have little to do with money itself but everything that money has come to represent – power, success, expectations, worthiness.
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Money is one of the biggest reasons couples get divorced…so I find it amusing that people are now taking out loans (and starting their life together in debt) for weddings.
Ditto-I just don’t want money to be an issue. Which of course is wishful thinking I suppose…on the other hand, I know many (rich) couples who never fight about money. Money is only a relationship issue when money is tight. Yet another reason to eschew debt, have a big income, and accumulate assets!
Money when it is a issue is often reflective of other things. My parents have known plenty of people who were financially well off fight about money. There are disagreements about how and where it should be spent. I really do believe clear and accurate communication about money is the most important part, and getting into a disagreement earlier on rather than later. People should have the same values when it comes to money. For instance a few years ago I dated a woman who told me she couldn’t be with someone long term who made less than 300k/year (her dad was a succeful cardiologist). I choked on my food a bit, and knew this was a relationship that was headed nowhere in the long term – it was fun 6 month ride and that was that.
My parents are quite well-off, but they still fight about money on occasion. My dad, who grew up quite poor, gets terrible money-related anxiety, which my mom, who grew up in a family with plenty of money, can’t really relate to. It causes fights, sometimes.
I think more interesting than the issue of relationships and money is the issue of relationships and class. My boyfriend makes a bunch more money than I do, but we come from very different social backgrounds. The former difference very rarely disrupts our lives; the latter rears its head frequently. It’s more central to who we are, you know?
Money was the subject of my husband and my first fight as a married couple (I still remember this almost 8 years later), and through the years has been the topic of our arguments more often than I would like to admit.
Unfortunately money, and what it represents, is the cause of a lot of issues in relationships. However, that doesn’t mean that it has to lead to divorce if you can find a way to work through those issues together.
I hate fighting about money, or anything else for that matter, with my husband and I can’t help but wonder if we had made better financial decisions early in our marriage would we still argue about it?
Money’s the reason why my parents are always fighting and arguing.
My dad complains my mother isn’t doing enough to help out with the bills. My mother complains my dad’s a reckless spender and his priorities are always for his parents first. They never come to a consensus on how to make things work or even agree.
In a few years once my younger sister graduates high school they’re going to separate or divorce because neither can stand each other and agree on how to spend money.
It’s so sad and frustrating to see that money gets in the way of all their arguments. And it always comes down to the little bills such as cable or my younger sister’s expenses. So I end up paying bills just so they won’t argue anymore. It’s just insane.
I’m going to give the radical suggestion (hinted at by Well Heeled’s post) that fights about money are not always, or even mostly, really about money; very often they’re about the power dynamic in the relationship. In too many relationships, both partners are more committed to competing with one another than in coming together as a team. I think competition is very healthy most of the time, but in a relationship, it’s a disaster.
Unfortunately, I don’t have any solutions to offer. My wife and I never fight about anything any more, but I didn’t wave a magic wand to get us there. When we started our relationship, I was a saver and she was a spender. Since our finances were separate, this rarely impacted anything except for the times when she backed herself into a corner and needed me to bail her out. (At that time, she was making considerably more than me.) She was always very good about cutting expenses down to the very minimum until she had paid me back (I would never have married her had it been otherwise). By the time we got married, she had been completely converted to my way of thinking, mostly because she saw, by observing me, how much better a way to live my way was.
Financially, I now do the strategy, investments, and taxes (all of which literally bore her to tears) and she does the tactics (i.e. shopping, including car and house shopping). I don’t give her a budget, because she doesn’t need one. “Spend as little as possible, but if you need it, buy it” is the only advice I give her. (Well, that and maybe “think really hard before you decide you need it.”) Because she still has those spending proclivities somewhere in her psyche, I give her a fairly substantial negotiated amount of money to spend on herself for her birthday and Christmas (which happen to be exactly six months apart). I spend a fraction of that on myself for the entire year (though I can spend it any time I like and there’s no set limit). Now, I could of course keep score and spend the same amount on myself that I allow her to spend on herself, but what would that achieve? It would just make us both poorer without any real gain to our relationship. The fact is that I don’t need to spend money to be happy. I get a much greater psychic lift by investing it. She has discovered that she doesn’t really need to spend money to be happy either, but it brightens both of our lives to see the lifts she gets from the occasional mad money without doing too much damage to our bottom line.
But all I’m offering are platitudes which everyone probably knows already – communication, teamwork, selflessness, commitment. Considering the elementary mistakes I often see couples make, maybe these platitudes should be talked about more often than they are. For example, the mass media only very rarely depicts happy marriages in its popular entertainment nowadays. Maybe this is part of the problem; I don’t know.
Hi Andrew
my story is pretty much identical to yours. except that my wife now complains that i spend too much money!
Heh. My wife can’t complain about that yet. I think if I ever did decide to spend too much money, she’d just take my word for it that we can afford it. (Fortunately, there’s not a lot of risk of that.) I’m still a little too frugal and I need her to balance me a little bit more. For example, we once spent a couple of years sleeping on a mattress on the floor because I’m not a shopper or spender by nature. (Our finances were separate at the time and she has always had an aversion to debt, thank goodness, so she couldn’t buy one herself because she couldn’t save up for it.) After she eventually convinced me that we really needed a bed, I did reluctantly conclude that we ought to have bought it some time ago. I’m working on this tendency though. She might convince me to get a cell phone one day (well, no, actually, that’s not going to happen).