A marriage counselor might suggest that you keep separate bank accounts, but you can never have financial intimacy that way.
Intimacy skills will help you combine forces and relinquish the chore of managing money to your husband so that you have one less responsibility and he can feel good about providing for the family—even if you bring in most or all of the money. Your focus shifts from worrying about finances to trusting him to manage them.
Most women I know have a lot of responsibilities: husbands, homes, kids, and jobs, just to name a few.
One responsibility that you may be able to relinquish to your husband is the job of watching over the bills.
If that seems unimaginable to you, welcome to the club. I resisted this idea mightily. Most of my clients do too, at first. We all felt that handing over the job of balancing the budget and paying the bills was giving up something that we needed to control. Especially if you make all or most of the money in the marriage, this idea can sound ridiculous.
Because of that, I consider relinquishing the chore of managing the finances the graduate work of the Six Intimacy Skills. First you need to get to the point where you’re experiencing connection and ease because you’ve become more respectful, and he is responding to that by cherishing you. Then you can think about relinquishing the finances. That’s why this chapter is near the end of the book.
So if this suggestion has you feeling uncomfortable, just skip it for now and return to it later, maybe in a few months. If your marriage is currently in crisis, switching up the handling of the finances is not the main priority. Practice the other intimacy skills first, then come back to this idea once you and your husband are feeling more connected, relaxed, and secure in your relationship.
If you are feeling brave enough to experiment with this suggestion, then let’s get started. Keep in mind that if any of this seems scary to do on your own, you can find and work with a coach who has been successful with this in her own marriage at skillsforlove.com.
One of the obvious benefits of giving up managing the finances is that you can use your newfound time for more self-care. Even better, trusting your husband to handle the money for you both is going to take your intimacy to a whole new level. It may not seem obvious that by letting your husband handle the finances you’re going to feel more cherished, but that’s what happens. As my client Bethany said, “I didn’t think there was anything wrong with the way we were doing our finances before, but things are a lot better now that I’ve relinquished that chore to my husband. Our relationship and finances have certainly improved since we did this.”
Penny had managed the household finances for so many years, she couldn’t imagine it any other way. As a military wife, she felt she had no choice but to handle bill-paying while her husband was deployed early in their marriage. More recently, his job and commute kept him away from home a lot. To Penny, it seemed impractical to ask him to do one more thing when she was a stay-at-home mom with more free time. Their family time was already so scarce, it just didn’t make sense for her to put one more thing on his plate.
But there was a problem. Penny found herself in the unpleasant position of often having to be the one to say, “No, we can’t afford that,” to her husband. She didn’t like being Mrs. No. She felt like a killjoy, squashing her husband’s ideas whenever she said “We don’t have the money.”
On top of that, because she’d always controlled the money, neither Penny nor her husband thought he would be capable of doing it. He simply didn’t know how, Penny told her coach. She said she tried to keep him apprised of the family finances, but it was hard because he didn’t really seem that interested.
When her coach asked her if her husband managed money, budgets, or inventory at work, Penny hesitated before she answered. “He absolutely does,” she acknowledged, sounding a little surprised herself. “He manages a really big budget and a good deal of inventory.” In that moment it became obvious to her that her husband clearly had all the skills he needed to manage household finances. It was just that neither of them had been looking at it that way.
Penny’s coach suggested that instead of making the decisions alone and reporting back to her husband, she could engage him by saying, “I don’t know what to do. We can either save some money for the trip to Disneyworld or we can fix the garage door opener like you wanted. What do you think?”
Penny liked that idea immediately. “As a soldier, my husband is a guy who wants to find a way to solve the problem,” she said. “If I come to him with that kind of question, he’s going to want to get involved.”
She wasn’t handing over the responsibility for their finances completely, but she was taking an important first step. The immediate benefit would be that Penny wouldn’t have to be the one to say, “We can’t afford to go to Disneyworld, but look how nicely the garage door opens and closes.” With her new approach, her husband would be contributing his best thinking to the family’s financial decisions, and she would no longer be lonely Mrs. No, the family killjoy.
In the first episode of the series Breaking Bad, Walter White is a chemistry teacher moonlighting at a carwash to make ends meet. His wife asks him, “Did you spend thirty-seven dollars on the Visa at Staples?” He admits that he did, and without bothering to mask her frustration, she tells him, “We don’t use that card, remember?”
Walter apologizes, and it’s very clear that this man is completely emasculated. He has no autonomy to decide what to buy or how to pay for things, because his wife decides that for him and corrects him when he doesn’t do things her way. No wonder he went bad.
I hate to admit that I used to do the same thing to my husband. I was calling all the shots, so there wasn’t much for John to contribute to the conversation, which was actually just a monologue I wanted him to sit through.
I’m not the only one. This is something that commonly happens when we women are controlling the finances—just like Walter White’s wife. We say things like “Don’t hit the ATM because we’re so low you’ll overdraw the account” or “You can take out forty dollars this week, but no more than that.”
It’s totally understandable, in a way. If you’re responsible for balancing the budget, then you want to control your husband’s spending because that’s a budget item. The problem is that you put yourself in a position no wife really wants to be in, which is being her husband’s boss—or even worse, his mother. That’s a lonely position.
What I want to be is my husband’s lover. I want him to desire, adore, and cherish me. Men don’t desire their mothers, so when I’m acting like my husband’s mother, I’m pouring cold water on the embers of passion. So I don’t want to be the person who tells my husband he can only take $40 out of the ATM. It’s not fun, it’s not sexy, and it doesn’t feel very dignified either. I don’t miss it at all.
Besides not being good for our sex life, controlling my husband’s spending was not very conducive to our family’s prosperity. It was so emasculating that John’s self-esteem suffered, which meant he didn’t have as much success in his work life as he does now. I was also so busy worrying about trying to control his spending that I was distracted from my own purpose in the world. As a result, our income was stymied.
I was also depriving my husband of the sense of accomplishment that comes with providing for his family. That’s his primary motivation when it comes to earning. It would be like asking him to play a game of basketball without knowing the score. Sure, he could go through the motions and make some baskets, but he wouldn’t have much of a sense of urgency or pride because he would have no idea how well his team was doing. He wouldn’t know how much effort to put into the game.
One of the things we commonly see when husbands take over the finances is that they begin to excel financially. It makes sense that when he sees a direct connection between what he earns and what his family gets as a result, his motivation and ingenuity increase. Once he knows the score—the amount of money in the coffers—it’s game on. That’s completely different than being the worker bee that hands the money over for someone else to divvy up. Now he has more connection to what he’s getting for his efforts.
Laney had recently given up the family finances when she saw a pair of boots online that she loved. She told her husband about them but decided she wasn’t going to buy them because they were too expensive. Her husband encouraged her to get the boots she loved.
Since Laney wasn’t controlling the finances anymore, it wasn’t on her shoulders to make the numbers balance, so why not? Her husband wanted her to be happy, and he liked the idea of his wife getting the boots she wanted.
“It was a great moment,” Laney said. “I felt special and spoiled in a nice way, because I wasn’t the one who had to balance the budget. I didn’t have that old feeling of guilt that I would have to trim the grocery budget or not get something for the kids. I could just enjoy being the proud owner of these beautiful boots that my husband wanted me to have.”
It’s not unusual for husbands to be more generous with their wives than the wives would be with themselves, but that generosity is obscured when you’re the one who’s paying the bills. Let your husband take over that chore and you might be surprised how much he wants to spoil you.
Another benefit of relinquishing control of the finances is the miracle of perpetual dating. Now when my husband and I go out, I don’t even bring my purse because I know he’s going to treat me. He opens doors for me and we hold hands too. I never even think about having to pay for things when we’re together. He always does.
Granted, he’s taking the money out of our joint account, which I contribute to too, but so what? I don’t have to figure out what the tip should be or think about how much we’re spending. I just get to say “Thank you for taking me out to lunch.” It’s like when we first met and he was always treating me. It’s a sweet continuation of those early days.
Sometimes my clients will say, “But I’m the one making all the money. He’s ‘treating’ me with my own money, which is not such a treat.” But I love the feeling of being taken care of, which I get from this arrangement. What does who earns the money have to do with who manages it? The last thing I want to do when the working day is done is look at bank statements or bills.
You might have some resistance to the idea of letting your husband handle the money. You might have concerns that he misses due dates, bounces checks, or spends too much. What you’re really saying is that you’re not sure your husband is responsible enough. I get it. I remember feeling that way too.
But when a wife is in control of the finances, that can contribute to her husband seeming irresponsible when he’s actually perfectly capable. If you say to your husband, “Don’t take more than forty dollars out of the ATM,” for example, he may revert to being a teenager who thinks, Just leave me alone, Mom. Your husband’s not being stubborn or irresponsible when he does that; he’s just being human. There are times when you’re triggering the exact response from your husband that you will later use as evidence that he’s not up to the job of handling the finances. Worse still, most wives don’t have any concept that they’re contributing to the whole mess. All we know is that we’re being responsible and frugal—and he’s not.
This is yet another example of the helpful-hurt-hopeless cycle. You’re trying to help him be more frugal, which he hears as control and criticism, so he gets hurts. He responds by rebelling or just ignoring you, which hurts you. Next thing you know, everyone feels hopeless.
Instead of trusting your husband and expecting him to rise to the occasion as a responsible adult, you’re reinforcing that you’re the “mom” who will take care of things if he screws up.
You don’t want to be your husband’s mother. You want him to find you irresistible to kiss and touch. It’s hard to get there when you’re telling him what to do with his money.
One thing you can do if totally relinquishing the finances to your husband feels too scary is to consider it an experiment. After you try it, if you find that this really just doesn’t work for your family, you can always go back to the way you’ve been doing things. I hope that knowing you’re not locked in to this new division of labor will help you be brave and go forward boldly, because there is so much to be gained.
That said, I would not announce to your husband that this is an experiment when you start. I urge you to keep that part to yourself. If you say to your husband, “Let’s just try this, and if it doesn’t work, we’ll go back to the way things are now,” he’s likely to give up before he starts.
My experience and the experience of thousands of my clients is that once you relinquish control of the finances, it takes your intimacy to a whole new level—and you are not going to want to go back.
Consider presenting the finances as something you can no longer do. The phrase “I can’t” is great to use in this situation, as in, “I can’t manage the finances anymore.” Pick your reason; at least one of these is bound to be true: “It’s too stressful,” “It’s costing me too much,” or “It’s draining me.”
What you’re really saying is that it’s draining to be your husband’s mom while he acts like a bad little kid or even a good little kid. But you’re not saying that to him, because that would be offensive and hurtful. Let “I can’t” serve as shorthand for “I can’t be your mom anymore and also have the kind of marriage I want to have” or “I can’t manage the finances for both of us and still be as happy, relaxed, and playful as I want to be in our relationship.”
If you and your husband have separate bank accounts, you might think you don’t really need to change anything because you’re not mothering him. As long as you’re not controlling what he does, why change, right? Plus, it’s nice knowing you can always put your hands on some money in case you need it. I still remember early in my marriage wanting to know I had the escape route that money provides.
But when you give up control of managing the money, you don’t lose your spending power—that stays the same. You still have access to the money, just as you did before. What you give up by joining financially is separation. When you keep separate accounts, you lose the intimacy that comes from trusting each other. You can’t have financial intimacy with separate accounts.
Sharing our money completely means I really have to rely on my husband. It’s one more way we’re connected. Our financial fates are tied together, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
It wasn’t until we had joint accounts and he was managing them that I experienced this level of vulnerability, which is a key ingredient to intimacy. It brings us a level of connection and financial intimacy that I wouldn’t ever want to give up.
When I say your husband is better with money than you are, what I mean is that he’s less likely to worry about it than you are.
One of our gifts as women is that we’re good at knowing how we feel and expressing it. We live in the realm of feelings, and because of that, we are also feelers around money. We feel fear that we’re going to run out of it. We feel guilty when we spend it. We feel sad when we lose it.
For women, money is about security. We want to make sure there will be enough if there is an emergency, that there are savings for retirement and for the kids to go to college.
For men, money is more about accomplishment. They are likely to be less emotional about it, and that can be advantageous. Worrying about money means indulging your fear, and your husband is less likely to do that than you are. By letting your husband handle paying the day-to-day bills, you’ll eliminate a source of energy drain on yourself.
Also, as you can imagine, people make better decisions about money when they’re not worried. Because your husband is less likely to worry, this really gives him an advantage.
I’m not saying he is never going to get emotional or excited or fearful about money. He will. He will certainly take his cues from you and respond accordingly. I know I can freak my husband out by saying, “How are we ever going to retire with the real estate market going down so much?” My level of urgency and drama about it will set him off too.
I can certainly bring him down that road with me, but in general, he’s calmer and more reflective around the ups and downs, which is another reason I’m so glad he’s the one managing things.
It’s so good for my inner strength to know that I am loved every day, to hear that I’m beautiful, to hear that I’m wonderful. I really can’t imagine it any other way than how I have it now. If I know something is going to make my relationship even better and bring more connection and passion, I want that. That’s where I want to live.
For me, it’s not enough to say, “At least we’re not in a crisis because we don’t want to kill each other or divorce anymore.” I want to have the sweet tenderness of feeling cherished and taken care of every day for the rest of my life. I’m guessing you do too.
Relinquishing control of your family’s finances is vital for getting to that level.