AFTER CANA

By Blake Sittler

Finances in marriage considered a spiritual issue

Like most married couples, Brooke and I sit with our finances periodically and have a talk about what is going on with our spending. The conversation usually sounds something like this:

“What is going on with our spending?!” one of us will yell.

“I know! What’s going on with our spending?” the other will reply.

“I thought we had some money!” one of us will yell.

“I know! I thought we had money, too! I guess we spent it all.”

“There has to be some money left! Where did we overspend?”

The leading cause of marital break up is not infidelity or substance abuse; it is finances. Finances is not a single-issue danger. Finances is legion.

Financial troubles in marriage may arise when spending practices are different. In this scenario, maybe there is enough money being brought into the house in the form of income, but one partner spends money — whether frivolously or prudently — and the other is more of a saver.  

Finances can be an issue when both partners are spenders or risky investors. If a couple is not careful, debt can quickly become the impetus for conflict. Even if a couple makes enough money, over-spending can sometimes be a symptom of unhappiness. Money can buy a lot of things, but it cannot buy the security of a lifelong relationship.

Many marriage and financial experts warn about the rising tendency of individuals in a relationship to practice financial infidelity. Sometimes the purchases may be minor, but the greater concern is not so much the amount of money being spent as the active practice of deception. This can take the simple form of pocketing change from a returned item or recycling to purchasing items and paying them off with money pulled from various other places.  

For Brooke and me, our main area of conflict is in terms of how we record our transactions. Brooke always basically knows how much money is in our account and finds security in balancing our chequebook. Even after 15 years of marriage, though, I will often forget for days to hand over receipts for my spending and thus frustrate her attempts to ensure our spending is balanced with our income.

Another practice Brooke and I have is to give each other permission to overspend periodically. We generally both know we don’t have the physical cash to pay for a particular item or treatment but we unlock the vault for each other partially because we want to feel like we are being generous to our partner, and also because we hope that in the future — when we want to overspend — that the favour will be returned.

Sophia Loren once said, “I’ve been rich. I’ve been poor. Rich is better.” But in the case of money in marriage, being rich is not necessarily better. It is not your combined income that necessarily affects your marriage so much as how you communicate about how you both spend and save.

Jeffrey Dew of Utah State University found in a study of 2,800 couples that those who disagree about money once a week were nearly one-third more likely to get divorced than those who had less tension in this area. Couples in the higher tax brackets divorced less often, not because they had better communication skills, but simply because they had more to lose.  

One of the greatest errors married couples make is to believe that money is merely a financial issue. Money is a spiritual issue. How we earn, save and spend reveals our ethics, morality, spirituality and politics. Money, like prayer, reveals some of the deepest truths about ourselves.

In marriage, we must communicate regularly about the financial state of affairs. It is important that we do not blame each other for not making enough money, being too stingy or spending too freely. We need to be as tender and respectful when talking about financial issues as we would talking about sex, our in-laws or children.  

Married couples need to shepherd each other and work together to decide how our salaries, our savings, our charitable giving and our consuming will create a spreadsheet — an accounting — of our core values and deepest beliefs. Whether we are one paycheque away from missing a mortgage payment or one harvest away from our first million, couples must respect the danger of neglecting money as a spiritual marriage issue. How we deal with money is not merely a matter of stewardship of our finances, it is also about our stewardship of each other.

Sittler works for the Diocese of Saskatoon in the office of Ministry Development and sits on the Diocesan Marriage Task Force. He and his wife, Brooke, have three children. He welcomes feedback and can be reached at aftercana@sasktel.net.