Does Money Really Wreck a Marriage?
Actually, no. It may cause arguments; it certainly causes tension. But even in these gloomy financial times, there is no evidence that money dooms relationships, even when one partner is the financial opposite of the other.
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Sam and Kate Roach share two daughters and a cozy Brookline home -- but not an approach to financial risk. "His philosophy is you have to spend money to make money," says Kate, a lively, blue-eyed business analyst for a health insurance company. "Mine is to save and save until you have the money to pay for something." Sitting in their fireplaced living room, whose pale blue walls are decorated by Sam's colorful paintings, the Roaches alternately laugh and roll their eyes when they discuss their different attitudes toward money -- and how that discrepancy has both challenged and enhanced their 13 years of marriage. The couple met soon after Kate finished college, when Sam was working as a security guard and dreaming of launching his own software company. They moved into an apartment in Brighton and then discovered how differently they felt about financial risk-taking. Sam, the son of a janitor and a seamstress, grew up in public housing while Kate's family owned a home in Acton, yet he was the one with the higher tolerance for risk. When he began his business out of their Brighton kitchen, Kate was terrified by the start-up costs, and the pair would stay up late into the night arguing about their finances. They even called off their initial engagement over money troubles - Sam and Kate's parents disagreed on how lavish the wedding should be -- only to get re-engaged and married a year later, in 1995.
"It may seem rosy now, but it was a bloody battle at the start," says Sam, a dark-haired 42-year-old with a quick grin. The battles lessened over time, they say, partly because Sam's ventures were successful and partly because Kate, 39, took over management of all the home finances.
"That gave me a sense of control," she says. She also learned to find other outlets for her energy whenever Sam embarks on a new entrepreneurial endeavor. "The last time he said he wanted to start a new company, I bought myself a hard hat and ripped out our basement," Kate says with a laugh.
"It kept her from yelling at me," Sam adds.
The Roaches agree that the discrepancy in their approach to spending has made for a useful system of checks and balances. "When we fight, we challenge each other, and the best outcome comes out -- not what he wanted or what I wanted, but what's best," Kate says, as the couple's two daughters run into the living room, seeking permission for a Saturday afternoon play date.
Conventional wisdom places money -- and what or whom to spend it on -- as a major source of marital strife. And as the recession deepens, issues like foreclosure, job insecurities, and shrinking retirement funds are certain to only make for an increase in difficult dinner conversations and worried whispers at bedtime. When a couple faces fundamental differences on spending vs. saving, investing vs. squirreling money under the mattress, the challenge may be that much more acute.
But there's good news for newlyweds and the long-married alike: Maybe money isn't the marriage-buster it's believed to be. "I'd heard for years this idea that money was the number one cause of divorce, but I'd never seen any empirical data," says Utah consumer economist Jan Andersen, who teaches workshops on personal finance at Utah State University. So he set out to find some -- and he couldn't. "What we found out was that financial problems are a very poor predictor of divorce," he says. "The statistical relationship is weak."
That isn't to say couples don't argue about money. Finances create tension in 84 percent of marriages, according to a Money Magazine survey from 2007. But Andersen's research suggests that if couples can work through who cooks dinner and who does the dishes, they can work out how much to spend on the food and whether to buy that new dishwasher.
Georgianna Collins agrees that money has been unfairly blamed as the source of marital woes. "Money can be a source of stress, there's no doubt about that, but it's usually not the main thing couples fight about," says Collins, a Cambridge therapist. When couples do come into her office bickering about the bills, Collins believes money is standing in for deeper issues. For example, she says, someone who feels trapped in a job to support a couple's lifestyle may resent any purchase her partner makes. A new tennis racket or bottle of pricey olive oil may spark the fight, but the real problem is that one person hates her work and blames the other. So Collins tries to help couples stop blaming each other and explore the emotions and assumptions behind the money argument.
It is probably not surprising that one person's thrift, or freewheeling ways, can make the other feel either valued or belittled in a relationship. Merchants encourage us to view spending as a means of expressing affection, whether for ourselves (L'Oreal's "Because I'm Worth It" campaign) or for others ("A gift of jewelry from Belden Jewelers is the perfect way to show how you feel"). We may know, intellectually, that someone can buy a diamond without being in love -- and be in love without buying a diamond -- and that racking up credit card interest for Botox treatments or a new boat isn't a great a way to show love toward ourselves. But it's hard to live in a culture that uses the language of affection and self-respect to sell material goods and not see money as meaning more than just money.
Still, sometimes, money fights really are about the money, especially if couples don't have enough to meet their basic needs. "But if they can stay united as a team and on the same side," says Collins, "they usually can manage."
For some financially mismatched couples, the only way to manage is for one person to cede control of money to the other. Tricia Prewitt of Wrentham fell in love with Brian Bukis more than 22 years ago, when she was a pharmaceutical representative and he was a mechanic working for
Prewitt, now 52, says the couple never discussed finances until after they were married. Many financial planners say engaged couples should have frank discussions about money prior to their wedding, but these conversations often get lost amid discussions of centerpieces. In Prewitt's case, after the I-dos, she discovered that her new husband had no savings and a tendency "to think credit cards are magic."
"There were a lot of mistakes that were made early on because of his not understanding credit," she says. "I thought he was showering me with these gifts, that he was buying them with real money, but he was not."
But 22 years and three children later, they're making it work. Prewitt, who earns more money than her husband, keeps the household money in her own account and pays all the major bills; her husband gets an allowance that comes out of his paycheck. Prewitt suspects that her managerial skills have enabled her husband to hang onto his spend-it-while-you've-got-it mentality. "If you don't have to worry about money because someone else is taking care of it, you don't worry about it," she says on the phone just before dinnertime, as her husband and their two younger children descend on the kitchen after work and school. Still, they've stayed together, despite Prewitt's on-going frustrations. "I still think he's really cute," she says with a laugh. "He's a warm, loving, give-you-the-shirt-off-his-back kind of guy, which appeals to me still." And, she says, while his carefree attitude toward life has been challenging in the financial realm, it's been good for her in other ways. "He tends to be very fun-loving and live-for-the-moment; I tend to be more cautious and conservative. I'm sure part of what attracted us initially was that he got me out of my shell."
Just as his personality has rubbed off on her, Bukis, now 50, believes his wife's more conservative approach to money is starting to rub off on him: "I'm getting around to it," he says, "after 20 years."
Rick Fingerman, a certified financial planner in Newton who advises Bukis and Prewitt, says a willingness to move toward the other person's position is essential for financial opposites and, indeed, for most couples. "Compromise is a great word," he says, "not just for money, but in a relationship, period." Fingerman says that when he helps couples create and achieve financial goals, he often feels like a marriage counselor: "I get sucked into that a lot, like 'Tell him he doesn't need new golf clubs,' or 'Tell her she doesn't need to get her nails done.' " Fingerman believes money takes its biggest toll on a marriage when there just isn't enough of it, but also when the goals are radically different -- and represent a fundamental difference in values.
He remembers one couple in which the wife wanted to create a college savings account for a toddler. Fingerman looked over the couple's expenses and noticed that the husband was leasing a Mercedes for $1,200 a month. "I said, 'What if you got a Camry for $300 a month, and we used the difference?' He looked at me like I was crazy." That kind of difference in values can make life difficult.
So can a major difference in upbringing. "My mother's a big hoarder; she'll buy like 80 rolls of toilet paper at a time," says Fingerman. "I was married to a woman whose parents were the opposite, and she'd want to go out to dinner and charge everything." He isn't, he adds almost as an afterthought, married to that woman anymore.
While money may be at the root of some breakups, the persistence of the "number one source of divorce" myth may have more to do with history than reality. Jan Andersen, the Utah researcher, believes our habit of blaming money may go back to the days before no-fault divorce laws, when "nonsupport" was one of the few reasons courts would accept to end a marriage. Since money was a legally acceptable reason, it became socially acceptable, too. "It's really easy to say, 'We had money troubles,' as opposed to, 'I was a jerk in our marriage,' " says Andersen.
I would take that further and say money may get blamed for breakups because we want to blame something: something others can define, and therefore avoid. It's paradoxically comforting when there is a concrete reason for a friend's divorce: She had an affair; he realized he's gay; they had money troubles. What's more disquieting are the murky reasons, like "we have nothing in common anymore." There's no formula for avoiding those. Money differences, in comparison, seem easy.
Former Somerville residents Eve Diana and John Murdzek have weathered mismatched approaches to spending, as well as mismatched incomes, for 20 years. Now living in San Diego with their teenage son, the couple speak with great respect of each other's approach to money. Diana, a former secretary now on long-term disability for major depression, admits she's a spender. "I've always been very free with money, even when I had very little of it," the 50-year-old says. She buys inexpensive stuff -- books and knickknacks -- and often shops when she is looking for emotional comfort.
Her voice becomes softer, and gentle, when she speaks of her 48-year-old husband, a college textbook editor. "I'm very grateful. A lot of things I really put down to John's tolerance. Emotionally, I can go up and down and indulge myself with shopping when I'm struggling. John is a much more even-tempered person, and he doesn't act out the way I do when he's struggling." She adds, "He always talks about 'our money,' which is very generous, because he earns most of it."
Yet Murdzek is equally admiring of his wife. He hates to shop, he says, and is grateful that she makes all the necessary purchases. He also admires the way his wife has curbed her spending in recent years. "I give her a lot of credit for pulling back from the brink sometimes."
Are there moments when he gets frustrated with her spending? Sure. But he reminds himself that their finances are basically sound, and he knows she's trying. Then he asks himself: "Is it worth an argument?"
Most of the time, he says, the answer is no. n
Alison Lobron is an associate editor at CommonWealth magazine. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.
