More Money Fights

Filed in archive Marriage and Finance on May 8, 2007

As promised yesterday, another post on the havoc that money can money can wreak upon a relationship. This time I don't so much have specific incidences from my own experience, but rather examples of general friction that money (or the lack of) has created in our lives.

#1: About two years after I graduated from college, my girlfriend and I moved in together. I had graduated into a very tough job market, and had had very little success finding a job. I had, however, managed to pick up some small freelance writing gigs here and there. After a while of this, I decided to see if I could just forgo the job and make an actual living as a freelancer. In short, I made very little money for the first year and a half that my wife and I lived together. She, on the other hand, was holding down a job that in retrospect didn't pay much, but was still twice what I was making.

This created some friction, in that I was determined that she would not start to pay for me. I'm not the most manly of men, but I do have a little bit of pride, and I wasn't about to freeload on her money. How this played out, however, is that I sometimes would refuse to go out if I didn't have any money, or even insist on us buying separate groceries so she wouldn't feel like she to scrimp on my account. I was often sweating my half of our measly rent payment, and thought I was doing her a favor. She thought I was being a loser, and that my pride was actually making both of us more miserable. She was indeed correct, but I have a feeling I would act the same exact way if the situation was to be replayed. (I eventually took a full-time job with a company I'd been freelancing for.)

#2: Following from number one, my wife was very interested in getting married at this point in our relationship where I still was not working full-time. I did not feel comfortable making that commitment until I felt like I had some sort of security finance-wise. She didn't see the problem---if we were already living together and I was broke, why did it matter if we got married and I was broke? My view, of course, was the opposite---we're already living together, why the hurry to get married? Let me get my career moving and then we can take that next step.

In the end, we split the difference---we got engaged but strung it out for a while, not actually getting married until a couple of years later, by which time we both felt better about our money situation.

Money's a dangerous thing to a relationship. You really have to talk about it a lot, and oftentimes you just have to agree to disagree, which basically means you're agreeing to live with all sorts of ongoing tension. But, of course, that's marriage :)