Long Relationships

In a recent column in The New York Times, M.P. Dunleavey, financial columnist and regular contributor to MSN Money, recounts the transition she made with her husband from being financial individuals to joining forces. Dunleavey was surprisingly reluctant to take this step:

You would think that writing about money for a living would have helped me to approach the situation with a confident, clear-eyed logic. Instead, I crossed my fingers and closed my eyes and assumed that my abundant love for my spouse would lead to financial harmony, some day, preferably by magic.

At a friend’s accusation that she lacked “financial intimacy,” Dunleavey and her husband had a “cards-on-the-table” discussion about their finances and came to grips with each other’s debt and spending habits.

Our financial illusions about one another were in tatters, but our marriage survived — and the whole experience helped me to understand how some couples can enter their 60s, the wife never having written a check, the husband having no idea that his wife managed to save $1.2 million in pin money during their marriage.

Experts warn that learning to talk about financial interdependence is a slow skill that may take 4-5 years to develop. Because how a person spends money speaks so directly from who that person is, the topic can be painful when disagreements undoubtedly arise. Dunleavey explains:

The cliché is that savers typically marry spenders, but Dave Ramsey, who has written several best sellers, including “The Total Money Makeover� (Thomas Nelson, 2007), came up with what I found to be a more helpful model. “Within most marriages there is a nerd and a free spirit,� he said, and one has to learn to tolerate the other’s foibles before financial progress can occur.

The column offers several tips to making the transition less painful:

- Bypass the hard numbers initially and discuss your hopes and dreams as a couple. Acting as a financial team will allow you to achieve these goals.
- There will always be areas of disagreement, but try to minimize them so that each person has some leeway to operate freely.
- Tolerating another person’s financial tendencies is a learned behavior, so be a willing student.
- Communicate on a regular basis (weekly, monthly) about your finances, but restrict the length of that conversation to less than 20 minutes.
- Declare the bedroom as a zone free of financial talk to maintain healthy boundaries.

Clearly, finances can be a sensitive subject, but entering into a committed relationship without discussing them is an easy mistake. It’s difficult to turn the corner from feel-good attraction to the cold bottom line. Despite the discomfort one might feel during these conversations, there is a positive outlook. Couples who talk about how they spend and save money are inherently thinking about their lives as a unit and the relationship is more than a passing fancy. Ultimately, this investment of time and energy should make its returns in building strong communication practices and a foundation for a future together.

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couples, finances, communication, disagreements

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