Increasing Financial Intimacy Through The 5 Stages of Intimate Relationships

How do you know where you stand financially? Is it through your intuition, hope, a look at your bank account, or your investment balances? 

Financially healthy couples have a working knowledge of their family’s net worth. 

So stop and check in for a moment. 

Do you know what net worth means? It’s okay if you don’t or if you need a refresher. Simply put, your net worth is the financial value of everything you own (home, savings, investments, cars, etc.) minus everything you owe (mortgage, student loans, debt, etc.).

Perhaps you have been running net worth statements for years, and you can’t understand why anyone doesn’t know how to do this. It’s easy for you. 

Regardless of where you are on this spectrum, financially intimate couples meet each other with compassion and care when there are differences in knowledge about money words and meanings. 

The Journey of Your Relationship

Intimate relationships go through very predictable phases. Each of these phases is an important developmental step in the intimate relationship. As couples pass through each phase, they will revisit opportunities for understanding their net worth together. 

5 Stages of Relationship Development

1. Bonding: This is also known as the falling-in-love phase. In this phase, partners are often love blind and uncomfortable seeing information about the other person that would not be good to see, including financial attributes.
2. Differentiation: Over time the love chemicals wear off, and partners start to see their differences. For those with insecure attachment patterns, this becomes very threatening. 
3. Practicing: Each person in the relationship is developing their identity outside of the intimate relationship. 
4. Rapprochement: This is a time when each person's sense of self is redefined, and they return to the intimate relationship with autonomy.
5. Synergy: Deep intimacy between a couple exists, and the couple can balance togetherness and separateness.

The stages of an intimate relationship unfold over the months and years. Just like in childhood, many factors support growth and development. At the same time, there is only so fast that a child can grow and mature; the same is true of adult intimate relationships. 

Building Wealth Together

One of the major tasks for an intimate couple is deciding how to manage the numerous aspects of their financial life together. This reality is unavoidable. Collaborating on money decisions cooperatively will lead to increasing financial intimacy. Each partner's choices and relationship with money impact the other. 

Couples' attitudes about money and wealth are likely to be experienced but not fully stated in the early stages of the intimate relationship. Over the arch of an adult life, attitudes about wealth can evolve and change in multiple directions. 

Some of my clients have shared how their parents started with intentional poverty and moved toward an acceptance and value around building wealth. 

Other clients have reflected on their parents leaving successful careers to live a life of “service,” which resulted in low income or poverty. 

As a couple, how have your attitudes about wealth evolved over time? When was the last time you talked with your significant other about their attitude regarding wealth? As a couple, this is an ongoing conversation over the full course of your relationship. 

Navigating Financial Anxiety, Avoidance, and Shame Together

Talking about your wealth as a couple is a journey that will evolve through the phases of your relationship. 

Some of the most common barriers to talking about your financial life as a couple are financial anxiety, avoidance, and shame. We each develop a relationship with money through our childhood and carry those experiences into adulthood. Negative developmental experiences with money can create these unhelpful habits or coping mechanisms.

These psychological and physiological (mind/body) reactions to money will impact your ability to look at your net worth as a couple. Your net worth is a picture of how your wealth is growing and changing over time. It is a representation of your shared financial security. Not knowing this financial information can represent patterns of financial anxiety, avoidance, and shame.

It’s a lot like not looking at the scale for fear of what it will reveal about your physical health. The difference between these two factors is that we hope to maintain a constant, healthy weight through adulthood, but we need to have an increasing net worth to support ourselves financially throughout adulthood.  

Loving Looking At Your Net Worth Together

As a couple, take a minute to think about what stage of relationship development you are in. There is no right, wrong, good, or bad stage of relationship development. Each has its joys and challenges. 

Here is one step to take for looking at your net worth in each phase of your relationship.

1. Bonding: Ask from a place of curiosity and nonjudgment about your partner and their family experiences around money and wealth. Create your first net worth statement together. 
2. Differentiation: Take time together to inventory and write down all the ways you are different financially. Differences initially may feel threatening, but in time they can be a great strength. Let’s name it to start to tame it.
3. Practicing: Reflect on the unique ways that you and your partner contribute to the family financially. Take ownership of how that may have some unintended consequences.
4. Rapprochement: Acknowledge the value each of you brings to the relationship financially and in nonmonetary ways. Revisit your past net worth statements and notice what has changed. 
5. Synergy: As a team, celebrate all the ways you have grown and changed over time. Let your net worth statement be a source of support for the future you will enjoy together. 

With every phase of an intimate relationship, there will be new challenges to work through. When we normalize this, we can see it as an opportunity for growth and development. 

Do you want more help looking at your net worth together and developing a financial plan? 

Then Therapy-Informed Financial Planning is for the two of you. Let’s schedule 30 minutes to talk about your relationship and net worth. 

Wishing You Healthy Love and Money,

Ed Coambs

MBA, MA, MS, CFP®, CFT-I™, LMFT