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More Money Fights

Filed in archive Marriage and Finance by Justin McHenry on May 08, 2007

More Money Fights
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 tensionlinks. But, of course, that's marriage :)


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