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Is money ruining your marriage

Fights about finances aren't new - but the ways couples are handling them are. More are seeking out courses to learn how to overcome their financial differences.

Mary Gooderham
Special to The Globe and Mail

When it comes to money, Mike Inch is a hoarder.
Impoverished as a child and abandoned at nine by parents working as itinerant fruit-pickers, he remembers squirrelling away spare change and tools. As an adult, he hates to spend money, and is happiest when he deposits a cheque in the bank.
"I feel warm and fuzzy inside if I can leave the money sitting there and not touch it," says Mr. Inch, an electrical engineer in Surrey. B.C. "It's a security thing." Mr. Inch's wife, Janice, on the other hand. is a spender. She grew up in "a stable, little-above-average family" and was provided with all the necessities by a generous father who, nevertheless tightly controlled the household purse. She likes a bargain but has "no problem spending money. I like to have fun, enjoy life," says Ms. Inch.
For 22 years of marriage. the fiscally different Inches found themselves locked in a mostly silent battle over finances. When Ms. Inch bought several PAIRS of Italian leather shoes at a bargain $9.99 each, she hid them behind a chest freezer, bringing out a pair every few months.
"Mike would say, 'Are those shoes new?' I'd say, 'Oh, I've had them for a while,'" she recalls. "I would avoid confron- tation, lie, sneak around. ...I was bad, like a kid."
Mr. Inch, meanwhile, lived in fear of his wife's spending without his knowledge. "I would feel anguish and anger, even over a new pair of shoes," he says. "I was closed; I wouldn't say very much. But I would just be in turmoil about it."
Four years ago, however, their stalemate ended when the couple took a course called Practical Application of Intimate Relationship Skills, or PAIRS. It taught them how to talk about money. explore the roots of their attitudes about it, draw up a budget and even fight about their finances.
Money and marriage. It can be a combustible combination. Indeed, money problems are a leading cause of divorce.
But if fights about finances are not new to marriage, the ways couples are handling them are. More and more are turning to marital education to learn the skills to communicate about their financial differences -and make their relationships last.
A growing alphabet soup of such courses includes: PAIRS; The Prevetion and Relationship Enhancement Program (PREP); Relationship Enhancement (RE); Couple Communication (CC); and SaVing Your Marriage Before It Starts (SYMBIS).
"Ninety per cent of couples marry the opposite," says Bill Dyck. who, with his wife, Charlotte, is a marriage and family therapist in Richmond. B.C. "When it comes to money. it's a constant battle between the person who loves to spend and is maybe more generous and thinks about today and the person who saves and thinks about tomorrow."
The Dycks offer a PAIRS program in 120 hours on six weekends spread over six months ($495 per weekend per couple). They teach how to share power over financial decisions, how to express anger in a way that is not threatening or emotionally charged, how to understand where a partner is coming from historically, and how to have a dialogue, suggesting sentence openings so both can speak and really be heard.
"You have to integrate the skills so they become a natural part of life." Ms. Dyck says. "You can't negotiate when you're carrying around lots of pain and anger."
The bottom line of education is to teach couples to expect conflict in marriage and offer them ways to deal with it.
"Couples who divorce have the same number of disagreements as everybody does," says Diane Sollee, the head of the Coalition for Marriage, Family and Couples Education in Washington, a worldwide organization aimed at making marriages last through teaching relationship skills. "The No.1 predictor of divorce is the habitual avoidance of conflict."
She says it is important to remember that both people in a relationship change, espe- cially when it comes to issues like money.
"Maybe you met your partner in a protest march and wanted to live on a farm and raise pigs or something. It's hard to say that now you want to buy a Porsche and buy mutual funds," she observes. 
Sig Taylor, a marriage and family therapist in Calgary, says that, because of that very embarrassment, 80 per cent of couples who get divorced do not seek outside help.
"Most of us don't take any time to learn how to have a great relationship -we assume we know how to do that."
He says money "is a real big button" because it is part of the "contractual" side of a relationship and covers a wide range of decisions, from how the rent is paid to what kind of car to buy.
In PAIRS' "powergram," couples divide such decisions into three areas of control: items of autonomy for each, items over which either has a veto and core values that must involve both.
Mr. Taylor says couples need to schedule time to discuss these contract issues so they do not leak into intimate or fun time. "You've got to talk about the money. If you can't, that's when the problems come in. A relationship is a livable set of agreements."
Another marital education course, PREP, uses shorter one-day to six-evening sessions ($75 to $350 per couple) to help spouses recognize danger signs and destructive patterns, and provide tools to communicate constructively.
"There's a lot of meaning attached to money," says Peter Gray, a therapist who offers the program at The Couples Institute in London, Onto "It doesn't matter if couples have a lot of money or none. It's more than dollars and cents; it's about power and control and who gets to make decisions about what."
Battling family debt is the message behind Financial Peace University, a Tennesee-based organization offering a 13-week program in the United States that follows the teachings of Dave Ramsay, a syndicated radio talk-show host and author who teaches that couples should eliminate consumer debt and cut up credit cards.
"We encourage husbands and wives. .. to learn how to manage money, work on a budget and live within their means," says Anne Marshall, marketing director for The Lampo Group in Brentwood. Tenn., which runs the courses rooted in 800 biblical references to handling money. "Couples can't keep postponing the day when that bill will come due."
Mr. Dyck says that while short programs help couples become more aware of financial actions, they do not change behaviour or look at the historical roots of people's attitdues about money.
"Core issues from our pasts kick us in our face in our adult lives," he observes. "My perceptions are formed by the way I saw Mom and Dad dealing with money and how I felt about it, and those decisions surface in my relationship with my partner."
For Mr. Inch, the extreme message that his parents could not afford to look after him when they left him in the orchard "undermined my whole self-esteem." There was alot of emotion tied to money."he says, adding that a PAIRS class assignment to go out and buy something nice for himself "was a big step for me. It turned out to be a tremendous amount of fun."
Lynda Rees, a couple and family therapist in Toronto, says her own parents were missionaries in India and she grew to hate wearing second-hand clothes. Such a background, she says, becomes a "bill" or set of expectations that people carry with them. They hope their partners will right past wrongs and "be everything they want." But they're usually unable to communicate their expectations directly. "It's the perfect setup for problems."
The trend toward self-employment especially puts pressure on relationships. The Inches have had to deal with uncertainty since Mr. Inch left his full-time job to work as a home-based consultant.
But his changing attitudes about money have helped. Four years ago, he was even reluctant to pay for counselling, but today he feels the $3,000 the couple spent on PAIRS has been well worth it.
The ultimate testimony for them was building a home two years ago - a risky proposition for a hoarder and a spender. However, they kept within a strict budget,and Ms. Inch was even responsible for shopping for the best prices and materials. "Whatever we come up against, we can deal with it, no matter what it is," she says. We're in this for the long haul."

COOLING THE MONEY WARS

Having fiscal feuds? Here are 10 tips to help turn down the heat:

• Make up a system that divides decisions - for instance, the maximum dollar amount of purchases - into five categories: two discretionary areas for each individual, two where the other person has veto power and one where decisions must be shared.
• Have a conversation where you listen, not just talk. The person who does not have the floor must repeat back to the speaker exactly what he or she said. That means not sitting there preparing a rebuttal, lawyer-style. If it sounds easy, try it...
• Try to understand the historical basis for you and your partner's attitudes, fears and anxieties about money.
• Expect conflict in your marriage and find ways to release anger, pain and fear, even setting appointments to blow off steam so it does not build.
• Get your spending habits and credit-card balances out into the open. Hiding from them and each other closes areas of co-operation and communication.
• Save talk about money for when you're not tired or hungry and aren't going to be interrupted. If things get too heated, call a 20-minute timeout. Money is a problem you should work on as a team.
• Keep money and other "contractual" issues out of intimate, fun times. Finances don't make good foreplay.
• If you're like Donald Trump and your spouse is more like Mother Theresa, don't figure you have an untenable relationship. After all, opposites attract.
• Hoarders: Spend money on something that gives you immediate pleasure, then write down how it feels.
• Spenders: Keep a log of what you spend money on, how it feels and how many hours you had to work to earn it.