After realizing that my values had to change dramatically, I knew I had to continue working on my marriage. Things were becoming more difficult for us. Not that we were heading for divorce, but we had been arguing a lot more than usual.
Study after study says that money is the number one cause of divorce in America. But is money truly the cause of most divorces, or are there underlying issues that are covered up by using money as a scapegoat? I married a Saver; I am a Spender. I had no idea this was the case when we first got married, and here we were seven years later, deep in debt. During our marriage we’ve experienced many ups and downs. Many of these have been about money, but looking back, the money issues actually grew from much deeper ones. I think our money fights and dealing with so much debt and stress actually saved our marriage, because we were finally confronting our problems head-on. Deeper issues were there from the start.
I can remember when Mark and I were in that big financial pit. I took the blame because the vast majority of our credit card debt came from me. Mark remembers knowing that all of this debt existed, that it wasn’t his fault, and that there was nothing he could do about it. We had some pretty heated fights. If we had participated in one of those marriage/divorce studies, our disagreements would certainly had fallen under the financial category.
But dig deeper and it is clear it wasn’t money that we were fighting over. Behind his back, I had racked up a bunch of debt. And before I knew it, we were in a mess—the kind of mess that has the potential to rip families apart. Deceit, fear, spending addiction, distrust—these were the underlying issues in our marriage—and they existed before the credit card debt. “Disagreements over money” was more a symptom than a cause of our problems. We were forced to work through some deep issues. It was hard, and it took time. But at the end of it, those “disagreements over money” might have saved our marriage.
Have you ever sat down and thought about what money actually is? You work at your job and get paid money. You go to the store and buy food using money. You use money to pay for the house you live in. So right off the bat, I’ve covered work, food, and shelter—the basics of living. But wait, there’s more—you use money for health care, to provide for your retirement, to give to charity, to buy anything and everything. Money enables us to live.
If a couple is constantly disagreeing about money, then they are disagreeing about the very things their relationship and lives are based on.
It might seem that if you just stop arguing about money then all will be good, and that if you simply had more money, you wouldn’t need to argue about it.
Why then do we see so many wealthy couples filing for divorce? Why do we see so many families scraping by who have amazing marriages? The answer is that money is not the real issue. It merely covers over much larger issues beneath the surface.
More families are struggling and living paycheck-to-paycheck than ever before. Mark and I were there, and many of our best friends are living this way. And I bet that even if you’re not there now, you are still familiar with living on the financial brink. And as far as a marriage is concerned, struggling financially can really strain everything. But it doesn’t have to.
For any given struggle, you can use it as a source of strength, or it can destroy you. I know there can be issues in any marriage regardless of financial means, but I also know of many super-strong crazy-in-love couples who are just barely getting by.
Here’s my take on this (and it comes from my own experience)—when you don’t have enough money, you are forced to make decisions together, good or bad. Financial hardships force you to come together and decide the priorities of your family and then put your money to those ends. It forces frugality. One of my favorite all-time quotes is from the Roman philosopher Cicero: “Frugality includes all the other virtues.” That just sums it up perfectly, right? When you decide to spend less money and make life work, good decisions impacting all areas of life will follow.
I met Mark as a sophomore at college in upstate New York. I was from Saratoga Springs, a town known for its Thoroughbred racetrack, white-pillared mansions, and upscale boutiques lining Broadway. Everywhere I looked, money offered the promise of “the good life” and everything that went along with it. Mark’s smaller hometown was worlds away from the Saratoga lifestyle I saw growing up. He was from New York’s proverbial rust belt, where major businesses have moved away, leaving high unemployment rates, closed shops along Bridge Street, and a largely blue-collar population. But it’s also a place where people know the value of a dollar, love their hometown, and continually work to revive their community.
The state school I attended was my college of choice for three important reasons: the criminal justice program was strong, and this was my major; I had been recruited for the field hockey team; and my parents had gone there as well. Little did I know that my decision to attend this school would be the best one of my life.
The summer between my sophomore and junior years I decided to stay at college rather than go home. I had a job bartending, and worked with the college theater program. I was learning to love the town of Oswego, with its annual summer festival, including three days of music, food, and bands playing into the night along the shores of Lake Ontario. Life was simpler there than back home, and I enjoyed it. Most of all, I was falling in love with a guy I saw playing drums in my church, a talented guy I’d heard about from his sister, who was in the youth group I led.
While I was nicknamed “the Princess” by my family for my uptown tastes and somewhat lazy ways, Mark was truly a prince—hardworking, academically gifted, attending college on a scholarship in economics and math, and a musician who loved drums and the rock group Rush. He valued family, wanted to make his parents proud of his achievements, and saw education as a way to move up in the world and better his life.
Then I came along. It’s significant that we met in church, for despite some outward differences of background and geography, our Christian faith was and still is our first priority. It’s what brought us together, what binds us together, and what forms the foundation of our lives on a daily basis.
Even though I came from a wealthy town, my family and Mark’s were more similar than one might guess. My parents were hardworking. My dad was first a schoolteacher and was later employed by General Electric. He and my mom built our home together. I grew up with a mother who knew the value of money. She knew how to budget, was careful with what she saved and spent, and also knew how to give generously. She also loved bargain hunting, and taught me the tricks of finding the best deals. Whenever we went shopping, we always checked the clearance racks first, and rarely paid full price for anything. My father’s work ethic, very much like Mark’s and his father’s, was ingrained in me from my earliest years. It took me a long time to realize that I was smart and a hard worker. It wasn’t until I met Mark, who challenged me in many ways I never had been challenged before, that I realized my full potential.
My parents provided all the necessities. I always knew that if I wanted something unnecessary and expensive, like a designer purse, I had to work for it. From the age of sixteen, I was busing tables and working in local shops to afford those purchases. I never wanted to go without the things I dreamed about, even from an early age.
Mark came from a family of similar values. His father owned an upholstery business, and his mother, who had a master’s degree in education, chose to stay home and raise her four children. While Mark never went without, he knew from an early age that if he wanted anything extra—toys or a bike—he’d have to work and save for it. His family never used credit cards and taught him to live frugally. At the age of nine he had a paper route, and he used that money to buy the things he wanted. In high school he was given $100 a year for clothes. If he wanted anything beyond that, he had to work and pay for it himself. This habit stayed with him in college, where he worked summers building swimming pools to earn spending money, and bought his first car with cash (a foreign idea to me at the time)—a rusty used Nissan Stanza that was practically falling apart. Education was important in his family. He studied hard, earned excellent grades, and received an academic scholarship to college.
He had his dreams, like driving the Audi we would eventually buy, and maybe living in a high-rise apartment in New York City. But he never expected to get those things without hard work and thrift. He lived according to those values growing up and into college. He was on track to make a good life for himself, and had no thoughts of marriage when we met, telling me that he didn’t want a wedding until he was forty. He assumed it would take time to build a career and a solid savings account.
Then we started to hang out a lot. From the minute I laid eyes on him playing the drums at our church, I found myself falling in love. I had dated enough jocks and jerks in high school to know that this guy was different—quiet, considerate, studious, serious, and of course handsome!
Mark first asked me out on a date in the parking lot of our favorite park overlooking the vast waters of Lake Ontario. We had hung out at a friend’s house that night, and I knew he liked me when he started holding my hand under the blanket while we were watching a movie. After the movie was over, he drove me to the parking lot where my car was parked, and said, “So, will you go out on a date with me?” The butterflies in my stomach were fluttering so hard, I felt I might throw up. I said yes, and we decided to go out the next night.
There we were, in an Olive Garden, the place where broke twenty-somethings go for a romantic date. You can’t beat the never-ending salad bar and breadsticks! We had a great night talking about each other’s families, our pasts, and our future life goals. The check came to the table and Mark said, “Shoot, I forgot my wallet!” I ended up paying for dinner that night, on our first date, on a credit card. This was one small precursor of the financial mistakes to come. Mark was very laid-back and didn’t give much thought to details. It was a great character trait, one that I loved about him, but his lack of attention to detail would eventually become something in our relationship that I would take advantage of. It was easy to spend money knowing that he wasn’t looking at our bills and accounts.
Mark went back to college in late August after our summer of falling in love. We knew we wanted to get married and talked about it often. We lived three hours apart and spent many late nights on the phone chatting about what our future together looked like. I visited him at his college frequently, horrified to find nothing more than frozen pizzas in the freezer and some ramen noodles in the cupboard. I spent much of our time on those weekends filling up his pantry, then taking him out to dinner. He was too cheap to care about what he was eating. He could eat the same three things every day and never get sick of them.
After six months of dating, he asked me to marry him on New Year’s Eve at midnight—right after the fireworks started going off in “our” park. I should tell you that to buy my engagement and wedding rings, Mark sold his beloved drum set on eBay. And it was just the first of many sacrifices he made for me.
We started making wedding plans, although many people tried to discourage us from moving forward too quickly, saying that at twenty we were too young to be engaged.
But we quickly started premarital counseling with our pastor, wanting to be prepared for a lifetime commitment. We talked about children, faith, forgiveness, and our goals in life. We never talked about money. We never talked about how we handled money or what our money goals were. During that time, I had no idea it would be an issue. I had no idea we were so different with our money. I just thought Mark was broke all the time, and that since I was making more money as a bartender I could spend more. I never once saw Mark as a Saver, and myself as a Spender. I can look back at that time and wonder if things would have been different had that been discussed in our counseling sessions.
My parents paid for our wedding, and I didn’t have to lift a finger. I was very budget-conscious, because my parents were footing the bill, and I chose a simple, strapless $300 wedding gown with a long veil that cost as much as the dress. I wore long white gloves and a family heirloom pearl necklace. I didn’t think much about anything that summer we got married. All I knew was that we were so in love and wanted to be together forever. We had only known each other for thirteen months prior to saying, “I do.” Some would say it was a recipe for disaster, but we knew it was a fairy tale.
I remember one of our first arguments was over a bag of Doritos. On our first grocery store outing as a married couple, Mark was shocked when I tossed a full-price bag of Doritos into the cart. He couldn’t believe I was so casual about buying a $4 bag of chips, something he never allowed himself. “What are you doing?” he blurted. I remember staring at him like he was crazy. I wanted Doritos, so why did he care? He also found it odd that I insisted upon wheeling the cart up and down every aisle, with no shopping list or plan about what to buy—just picking and choosing as I walked along. It was then I discovered that Mark bought about six items a week, and knew exactly where they were in the store. That was no way for a princess to eat, so I got my Doritos despite his disapproval. Looking back, we can laugh about that now, yet in some ways it was a tiny but important blip on a radar screen that we ignored. We never realized we handled money so differently and how huge a role this issue would play in our relationship and future.
After we were married, we moved into our first apartment, on an upper floor in a junky old house painted half white and half teal green. It was an ugly house and was flea-infested, but it was our first place together as husband and wife. We paid $325 per month and all of our furniture was hand-me-downs. Thoughts about how to live never concerned us. We were together. We were young and full of dreams and energy. Anything was possible. And we didn’t need much apart from each other. Or so we thought. Our wedding gift money kept us afloat for a while, as well as income from odd jobs. Mark tutored, I worked at a winery, and we were getting by. When we needed or wanted things out of reach of our cash flow, we found it easy to charge them on credit cards—or I should say, I found it easy. Mark was not quite on board with the credit card life yet.
Mark finished out his last year at the State University of New York at Fredonia to graduate magna cum laude with a double degree in math and economics, with a wife, and Doritos in the cupboard. Following his graduation, we moved back to his hometown. We had a pug named Maddie, and since we couldn’t find a decent rental place that allowed dogs, we purchased a small starter home with the help of a $5,000 loan from his grandma Rose. Since Mark had been such an excellent student in college, he got a job as an actuary immediately after graduation. Credit was not hard to come by with his job and income. Even though we had no idea how to handle credit cards, loans, budgets, or to plan for the next year, let alone next month, we were offered credit and loans at every turn.