With more than half of marriages ending in divorce and disagreements over money regularly cited as one of the foremost reasons for the split, don’t you think it might be a good idea to talk about how we can avoid financial disagreements?
Well, that might be nice, but we can’t.
We can’t avoid disagreements in marriage in general—in fact, as illuminated by Drs. John and Julie Gottman, an absence of all conflict might even indicate emotional disengagement rather than harmony. And that’s ok, especially if we view the partnership as an exercise in personal development as much as it is in personal happiness.
Financial disagreements can strengthen our relationships
We can, however, learn how to disagree more effectively, even productively, and strengthen our relational bond in a virtuous cycle of anti-fragility. Here are three ways to do just that:
1. Learn your significant other’s personal money story.
Have you ever observed your special someone’s interaction with money and questioned their character? Maybe your partner exhibited a spending problem—they just can’t seem to control themselves. How, you wonder, can you trust them with the biggest decisions in life if you can’t even trust them to manage measly dollars and cents?
Or maybe they showed signs of being a miser. This can be even more damaging relationally because it’s not a far reach to conclude that they use money to exercise control—or worse yet, that they love money more than they love you.
It’s surprisingly easy to make character judgements about someone based on how they interact with money, but when we do, we wade into some dangerous territory. While there certainly are scenarios where someone’s behavior with money is symptomatic of something deeper that may require a therapeutic solution, it’s more likely that our financial decisions are simply representative of how we are wired, how we were raised, and how our life experiences have shaped us.
I learned from financial therapists Dr. Ted Klontz and Rick Kahler that no matter how seemingly senseless our financial decisions appear, they make perfect sense when considering our past experiences with money. Therefore, we can free ourselves from the temptation to demonize our partners when their money management differs from ours by better understanding their personal money story.
The challenge with telling our money stories is that we typically don’t know how, so here’s a simple tool to help you do it. This Personal Money Story exercise uses a coherent narrative concept to allow you to chart the impact of your financial life experiences. You start by recalling your first money memory—a recollection that will likely only take seconds—and identifying it as either positive or negative. If it was positive, you rank the impact from 1 to 10 (10 being the best).If it was negative, you rank it from -1 to -10.
What’s your Personal Money Story?
As you trace your money memories, your personal money story becomes quite clear. And through that clarity, we can now view our spouse’s financial foibles less as character traits and more as representative of their life experiences.
Yes, it’s partly true that you can discern someone’s priorities in life by looking at how they spend their money, but it’s not quite that simple—and if you oversimplify this issue, it can put your marriage on shaky ground. Once our subconscious financial wiring is revealed consciously through the money story, we can examine—and adjust—our behavior as desired.
2. Clarify with questions, not commentary.
Armed with a better understanding of our partner through their money story, we can now advance to a new form of interaction in our inevitable financial discussions using this simple rule of thumb from Stephen Covey’s paraphrase of St. Francis in his self-help classic, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People:
Seek first to understand, then to be understood.
But how? Clarify with questions, not commentary. No quegesstions, by the way—“How did you blow the budget…again?” And please don’t forget the all-important step in understanding: really listen after you ask the question. If you’re not sure if you’ve succeeded in this endeavor, a sign of failure is if you interrupt, of course, or even speak the second the other party punctuates their point. When we really listen, there should be a break before we respond.
Dare to lay down your defenses, give your chosen life partner the benefit of the doubt, and remember that, in relationships, if anyone “wins” an argument, both suffer a loss.
3. Expect—and plan for—mistakes.
The final tool for using financial disagreements to strengthen relationships is proper expectation setting. Expect mistakes. Recognize that money management is more an exercise in mistake management than a pursuit of perfection. We can plan for those mistakes through margins in our budgeting.
Indeed, cash is king in budgeting (and is finally earning a reasonable interest rate again for the first time in a couple of decades!). Whatever you want to call it—emergency reserves, buffer, or savings—by expecting the unexpected, you’re saving more than money.
You might just save—and better yet, strengthen—your marriage.
