Have Low-Conflict Conversations About Money and Enhance Intimacy
You’ve met your soulmate and decided to get married, engaged, or move in together. But while making plans for your happy life together, you soon discover that you have a spender-saver dynamic and that discussing money evokes a variety of complex emotions such as shame, envy, anxiety, panic, and pride. Financial disparities between you and your partner’s incomes might also trigger resentment, especially if there are imbalances in the distribution of chores and childcare responsibilities.
Or maybe you’ve been married a long time, and talking about money transactions is challenging because you have different financial histories and/or financial styles. For instance, when Melanie, forty-eight, and Rob, fifty, discuss money, Rob often gets defensive because he makes reckless decisions about spending that make it difficult for them to pay their bills at times and have caused him to have a bad credit score. As a result, they have not been able to qualify for a lower interest on their mortgage by refinancing it.
This couple has been married for twenty years, and Melanie was raised in a single-parent family where money was tight. She identifies as having a moderate saving financial style with a money vigilance script which causes her to be frugal. On the other hand, Rob was raised in a two-parent middle-class home, and his financial style is that of a super spender. Because his parents often argued about money, Rob frequently feels anxious about the thought of discussing finances with Melanie. He has a money worship script that frequently collides with Melanie’s money vigilance script. They have three sons, ages six, ten, and twelve, who are all active in sports. Melanie works as a financial analyst at a bank, and Rob is self-employed as a carpenter.
Even though Melanie and Rob are both employed full-time, they often find that they have more money going out than coming into their bank accounts. And they both have a tendency to blame each other for their financial problems rather than acknowledging that they’re equally responsible. As a result, they have a history of arguing excessively about money, and they’ve become emotionally distant from each other.
Melanie explains,
When it comes to money, Rob goes on spending sprees and doesn’t tell me, so we often overdraw our checking account and have to dip into our savings. Rob has a problem with overspending. Last month, for example, he went shopping with our three sons for school clothes and went crazy buying them stuff they didn’t need. Then to make matters worse, he charged several hundred dollars on his credit card and went over his limit and didn’t tell me.
During our therapy session, Melanie shared that she set up an emergency fund (for three months of their expenses) when her grandmother left her a small inheritance recently. She also deposited some of the money into college funds for their children. She didn’t tell Rob the exact amount she inherited because she doesn’t trust him with money. Melanie told me that she’s working on building trust with Rob by being transparent during our sessions and their money talks at home. I explained to her that not disclosing the precise amount of her inheritance to Rob is more a matter of privacy rather than keeping a secret because he knows about the inheritance. Additionally, there aren’t any negative consequences associated with her keeping the amount private. However, I suggested that she might want to disclose the amount to him as a sign of goodwill. In Chapter 9, you’ll learn how to determine the difference between keeping financial information private or keeping secrets, which is considered financial infidelity.
The next time I met with Melanie and Rob in my office, I spoke about the importance of full disclosure when it came to finances (for both of them) so they could build trust and financial intimacy. Melanie agreed to become transparent and disclosed the amount of money in their emergency fund and college funds to Rob, in spite of her fears. During follow-up sessions, we discussed the consequences of Rob’s reckless behavior on their finances. Rob stated that he was embarrassed about his irresponsible behavior with money that led to a poor credit score and late fees. He knows he gets defensive because he fears Melanie will give him a lecture and they’ll fight. This makes him avoid talking about money with Melanie. By attending regular therapy sessions, Melanie and Rob are working on having lower conflict so they can have more constructive money talks.
