How To Navigate Different Financial Expectations With Your Partner

We all have financial expectations of our intimate partners. Financial expectations are how we set financial goals and make financial decisions with our intimate partners. Our financial expectations determine things like whether we have a joint account or keep separate accounts, talk about our credit score, use of credit cards, and whether we have open communication and common goals. So much of our financial future hinges on our money talk and the way that we navigate financial issues and financial compatibility. Money issues and money problems follow very predictable patterns that a financial therapist can help you navigate if you get stuck in your financial situation.   expect people to behave and how much we expect to spend on certain things. 

It can be easy to miss financial expectations in intimate relationships, which can be a major source of distress and conflict. One of the most common issues resulting from missed expectations is financial infidelity, which will definitely interrupt your long-term goals for your life and your partners. 

The best way to think about financial expectations is in three ways. 

They can be met, missed, or exceeded. 

Take this first step to stop and think about it for a minute. What is the ratio of met, missed, or exceeded financial expectations in your intimate relationship? 

How does this leave you feeling? Grateful, Sad, Angry, Anxious, Scared, Joyful, Numb? 

Perhaps you're ready for more conversations about money matters. Keep reading this blog post to learn how to create a safe space and common ground for the successful relationship you desire. 

This blog post will explore the relationship between financial expectations and emotional responses. 

Emotional responses are sometimes contradictory responses that signal whether we have missed, met, or exceeded expectations. 

Depending on the emotional response, a whole sequence of interactions and evaluations of ourselves and our partners will happen, all in the blink of an eye. Thank you autonomic nervous system (fight, flight, freeze, fawn system)! 

We all have financial expectations of ourselves and our partners, covering topics like spending money, an emergency fund, a prenuptial agreement, a new car, a joint bank account, a dream vacation, credit card debt, etc. 

Of course, there are many other people we hold financial expectations of including our bosses, parents, siblings, friends, community, and society at large. We are part of a massive economic system with complex and dynamic interactions. 

But let’s stay focused on what happens between you and your partner for today. Otherwise, we will get stuck talking about politicians, business leaders, and whoever else you think is not meeting or matching your financial expectations.

I would like you to stop for 3 - 5 minutes and do a brain dump of all the financial expectations you have of yourself and your partner. This can include expectations regarding a joint budget, financial values, income, expenses, savings, money dates, gifts, work, charity, family, travel, you name it there is a financial expectation baked in there. Let your gears turn and see what comes up. 

Financial Expectations 

So why do we have financial expectations? 

Financial expectations help us to move more smoothly and predictably through life. They help us know what to expect. 

Have you ever traveled internationally where they use a different currency and all of sudden you don’t know if you’re paying too much for lunch or dinner because you haven’t converted the currency yet? This is the value of financial expectations. 

Financial expectations provide us with predictability in our intimate relationship with our partners. 

When we are first starting out together, there are many financial unknowns, from who pays for dinner (yes, I know the old convention was the guy does that) to how bills will be paid, what hobbies money will be spent on, and how much to pay for a hamburger. There are more financial expectations than you could count. 

Life Span

Here is the tricky thing. Financial expectations never go away; there is no escaping them. 

You can become rich and famous, and there will still be financial expectations; you can become a monk on the mountain, and there will still be financial expectations; or you can keep living your life, going to work, raising kids, and enjoying grandkids. Wherever you are in life, you will be navigating financial expectations of yourself and your intimate partner. 

I have met many people who hold the conscious or unconscious thought that if they somehow reach some imagined financial position, they won’t have to deal with the pressure of money. 

Remember, the pressure we feel about money comes out of expectations. 

3 types Of Financial Expectations

As we navigate over our lifespan, we are going to encounter three types of financial expectations. 

• Everyday expectations
• Once in a while, expectations
• Once-in-a-lifetime expectations. 

Everyday expectations are about the food we eat, the things we buy on Amazon, the gas we put in the car, and what financial information we share with our partner. For many, this is pretty routine. 

Then we move out into the once in a while expectations that can include trips, cars, houses, career changes, education. 

Then we have the once-in-a-lifetime decisions like retirement savings goals and estate planning decisions. 

Here is where things can get challenging, our financial expectations can change over the course of our life based on a wide variety of factors. 

My main point is to help you see just how many financial expectations you hold and that, in some ways, they are all interrelated, even if we are not thinking about them all at the same time. 

At a much deeper level, we have a system of financial expectations. 

These financial expectations are governed by a mostly invisible interplay of biological, psychological, sociological, and spiritual/meaning-oriented realities. 

When our financial expectations don’t match our partner’s, we can feel despair, frustration, anger, shame, and sadness. 

When you feel these difficult emotions, you need effective relational skills to navigate the relationship rupture and move towards repair so that you can feel good in your partnership again. 

Financial Expectations Missed = Despair

When I work with couples in financial therapy, the issue of missed financial expectations comes up frequently. 

It is like a couple is dancing, and then suddenly, one partner steps on the other’s toes, and they don’t know how to get back to dancing together. 

Some couples start out on the same dance, but then move into different dance moves, while others were never dancing to the same music from the beginning. 

Either way, financial expectations get missed, and despair sets in. 

Here is where things get tricky. Most couples stuck in a cycle of despair around financial expectations can’t see how deep and personal the other person’s financial expectations are. 

We all have deep, complex, and dynamic financial expectations. These expectations are the invisible dance moves in our heads about money. They feel right, normal, and familiar to us. They are our subjectivity. They are based on our money beliefs. 

Part of moving through the mismatches in financial expectations is learning to see our own subjectivity that feels like objective truth.

Attachment Style and Trauma History

I have talked in past blog posts about the power of our attachment styles (take the attachment style quiz) and trauma history (check your ACE score) to shape the way we interact with money. 

Our particular attachment style and history will drive how we navigate the inevitable missed financial expectations. 

If both people have secure attachment styles and low to no trauma in their backgrounds, then they will be able to use practical perspective-taking skills to see the misalignment in financial expectations and find supportive, caring, and empathic ways to return toward relationship repair. 

On the other hand, if you or your partner has an insecure attachment style and trauma in your history, it is going to be harder to navigate the missed financial expectations and return to relationship stability. 

Recently, I watched several episodes of Heist on Netflix. Talk about the intersection of missed financial expectations, relationship rupture, and an inability to recover relationally. 

This show sheds light on how extreme things can get around missed financial expectations and attachment styles. 

No, they did not name each person’s attachment style, but once you learn to see it, you can’t miss it. 

In each profile of someone who committed a heist worth millions of dollars, there was an intimate relationship, financial expectations unmet, and extreme behavior to try and reconcile or keep the relationship going. 

It profiled what would seem like three very different people and their stories: a woman from a profoundly drug-addicted family, a Cuban immigrant, and a Kentucky bourbon worker. Yet each had a history of more profound trauma, and if evaluated would have had insecure attachment patterns. 

They could not resolve initial relationship and financial dilemmas, so over time, they resorted to more extreme behavior. The simpler the equation, the more distress, and the more extreme the behavior became.

While you may never go to the extent of stilling millions of dollars to resolve differences in relationship and financial expectations, there are many smaller ways that you may try to accommodate mismatches in financial expectations. 

With this in mind, not all is doom and gloom. 

Financial expectations can be exceeded, leading to delight, gratitude, and joy. 

Financial Expectations Exceed = Delight

What happens to you when your partner or you exceed your financial expectations? 

I want to say it is always a good thing, but it is not. It is heavy, I know. 

Our relationships with money are complicated. 

Positively exceeding financial expectations, like having a larger tax refund, getting a pay raise, your partner springing for the nicer birthday gift, and so many other ways, can be a great experience. 

If you have a secure relationship with money and a healthy relationship with it, then having your financial expectations exceeded will likely lead to a response of joy, delight, gratitude, and, yes, even love. 

On the other hand, if you have one of the insecure attachment styles, and a more problematic relationship with money, even what many people would consider financial expectations being exceeded can evoke suspicion, concern, anxiety, shame. 

Let’s take a typical example I see. 

One partner buys a nice gift for the other partner. 

You would expect that partner to be grateful and excited, but instead, it evokes withdrawal and either an explicit or implicit statement of saying I don’t deserve this. 

Again, we run into a subjective evaluation that has a deeper history to it than the current gift that has been given. 

There can also be some larger contextual realities that spoil the nicer-than-expected birthday gift in this case. For example, the family debt that has continued to grow, or the person receiving the gift internalizing a rule that nice birthday gifts are not worth it. In their childhood, their parents didn’t have the money to give lovely gifts or minimize how excited they should be about the birthday gifts they were receiving. 

In these experiences, people are missing out on the joy of money. 

It doesn’t have to be this way. Exceeding financial expectations can be a positive experience. 

Understanding and Empathy

Let’s bring this full circle. You and your partner have many different financial expectations that span the spectrum of possible topics. 

We are not going to get rid of financial expectations, but instead we can learn to embrace, explore and yes sometimes evolve our financial expectations. 

Remember, our financial expectations made and make sense in the particular context within which they developed. 

You can learn to understand how these developed and the patterns of your money beliefs with tools like The Family Money Tree course. 

Once you understand how they developed, the question is whether they still make sense today in your current context and reality. 

Life is complicated, and changing your financial expectations is not always easy, but it can help you move toward a place of greater congruency. 

Let’s meet our financial expectations of ourselves and our partners with financial empathy, compassion, and curiosity. 

If you don’t know about your attachment style or how your trauma history may be impacting your relationship with money, I invite you to read my book The Healthy Love & Money Way: How The Four Attachment Styles Impact Your Financial Well-Being. 

Developing a healthy relationship with money is a process and not one you must do alone. This is why I developed The Couples Guide to Financial Intimacy based on my years of working with couples and the ideas and activities that created long term change. 

Ready for 1 on 1 support? Then perhaps Therapy Informed Financial Planning is for the two of you. I invite you to schedule your free 30-minute discovery call today.

Wishing You Healthy Love and Money,

Ed Coambs

MBA, MA, MS, CFP®, CFT-I™, LMFT

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