If You're Fighting Over Money, You Might Be Missing The Point
Hell yes, people fight about money. But you have to peel off some bills to get to the heart of the matter.
By Martha Baer
My poor cousin Dan. A middle-aged joker with a surprising spiritual bent, he'd been single a long time when he met... well, let's call her Lynn. It was great, he said, to be intimate with someone again. They saw each other every day, and within a couple months they were living together. But even on their first date, Dan remembers, there were signs: all the talk about the Lexus or Infiniti she wanted; all that food she ordered and didn't eat. Nevertheless, he felt good about the agreed-upon plan for sharing his place, which he owned. Lynn would pay $500 for rent, about half of what she'd been paying on her own, and they'd split everything else.
Within a year, though, things changed. The first time Lynn said she had no money to contribute that month -- despite her mid-level job for a heath insurer that had her jetting around the Pacific Northwest -- Dan said it was fine. "Stuff like that happens," he told her. "Just don't make a habit of it." But she did, all the while coming up with unconvincing excuses involving travel reimbursements that never showed up. "I thought, is she doing drugs?" Dan remembers. "Gambling? No, that wasn't her style. I'd beg her to give me a good reason. I wanted a reason more than I wanted the $500."
In the end, he called it quits, and, in the process, learned the truth: For years, while her debts mounted, Lynn had been buying things -- mostly clothes, which she'd pack away and never wear. When she finally moved out of Dan's house, he found six fur coats stored in one closet. Another room was full of brand-new items of all kinds, "literally from the floor to the ceiling." She never came back to pick it all up.
"It helped," Dan confessed, "when I first heard the term 'compulsive shopper.'" Not that he, an inveterate non-shopper, could really identify -- but he could sense that they'd broken up over something far more painful and psychologically ingrained than poor money management skills. "One time she said to me, 'I feel like I'm nothing,'" Dan remembers, flooded with sympathy. "It was like when she bought something, she was trying to increase her presence in the world."
More than money disturbing the peace
In this divorce-happy age, conventional wisdom targets financial issues as one of the leading causes of marital breakups. But my cousin's story -- extreme though it is -- suggests that if you peel back the layers, you almost always find that there's much more than money disturbing the peace. In fact, the only study on divorce that used real-time data (as opposed to relying on couples' memories of their rifts) found only a tiny correlation between financial problems and failed marriage. At the beginning of the 12-year study, conducted by consumer economist Jan Andersen of California State University in Sacramento, all the participants were married. At various points in time, the more than 2,000 randomly chosen couples answered a long slate of questions about their marital stability, concerning everything from their health to their church attendance to, of course, their financial habits. When Andersen looked closely at the results, he got a surprise: Only a tiny number of couples that logged negative responses on the money questions wound up divorced.
"I was a little disappointed," Andersen confesses. "I had believed, just like everybody else, that money was the problem." But he soon began to see money as one of many factors -- along with issues like sex and in-laws -- that contribute to a "stress threshold," above which divorce tends to occur. "We do know that couples fight about money, and I think if we get them to handle it better, we could reduce the level of stress," Andersen says. But ultimately, he concludes, "Money may just be a mask."
"Money can be a vehicle for other conflict and hurt. For example, a person who's angry about sex might withhold money." |
Many therapists agree. Lois Gold, for instance, has particular insight into why people split up. She not only coaches couples still struggling to make their relationships work, but is also a licensed therapist and divorce mediator (which means she can facilitate a divorce, lightening the load of family courts and hopefully making the process less ugly). Over the past 25 years, Gold has handled more than 1,200 mediations between spouses who are certain their troubles can't be fixed, and has written a book called "Between Love & Hate: A Guide To Civilized Divorce." "Money can be a vehicle for other kinds of conflict and other kinds of hurt," she explains. "For example, a person who's angry about sex might withhold money." Financial issues can also play out more subtly. "I once worked with a couple who'd agreed that the wife would stay home until the kids went to school, and then she'd start earning again," Gold remembers. But the woman procrastinated, and the husband grew resentful. Over the years, the wife lost confidence about measuring up in the workplace, and the husband interpreted her fears as not wanting to help him out with expenses. "He got so angry after a while that the first thing he did when he came home every day was to inquire about what job hunting she'd done," says Gold. "The pressure only made her feel worse about herself, and the situation undid the relationship."
Used money as a means of control
Of course, there's no psychology without family, and many financial conflicts arise from issues that long pre-date the honeymoon. For instance, inheritances can challenge the strongest relationships. Take Lisa K., whose lover's wealthy family used money as a means of control. Horrified that their daughter was involved with another woman, Lisa's partner's parents stopped sending checks. After five years of real devotion, the romance finally collapsed under the family assault. Lisa's partner went straight home -- then to Switzerland, Iceland, Chile, and finally to a realtor who found her a condo in Washington, D.C. "I just thought she was a regular person who didn't have student loans," Lisa says. With time, though, she learned that her ex belonged to a family that expressed emotions like a bunch of bank clerks. "She really is honorable, but there's this thing about wealth," muses Lisa. "I never met people who wanted to be rich so much."
In short, money is never just an amount -- it's a symbol, a fetish, a tool. "She wanted their love," Lisa says of the ex and her family, "and they leveraged their love with money."
Complexity of human psychology
The lesson here is that in many "money" breakups, subtle (or not-so-subtle) signs often point to the infinite complexity of human psychology. Commonly expressed emotions include: cravings for attention, fears of the unknown, or judgments about class, among any number of other conflicts. Deep problems like mistrust or resentment can be transformed into stinginess or financial recklessness.
And when you think about it, almost everyone has some kind of money problem: an easy, breezy substitute for things we're too busy to analyze, or too ashamed to confess. So if you're fixating on a money fight, you might be missing the point. And make sure to remember that, as therapist Lois Gold puts it, "It's not what the conflict is about that causes a breakup. It's how the conflict is handled. Each person needs to be heard and understood."
Martha Baer is a co-author of "
Safe: The Race to Protect Ourselves in a Newly Dangerous World." She's at work on a book about relationships between adults and teens.
Copyright (c)2006 Tango Publishing Corp.
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