my story is pretty much identical to yours. except that my wife now complains that i spend too much money!

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.

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 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?