How to Play the Long Game in Marriage and Money

How long have you been with your spouse?

Fostering a long-term relationship with your partner is no small accomplishment, especially if you want to say your relationship is thriving and one you love being in. 

Every week as we work with couples at Healthy Love and Money, we get to meet couples in their frustration, disappointment, and confusion. 

They desire to have a loving, long-term relationship with their spouse. 

They want to feel a sense of financial security and abundance. 

Life is happening—navigating kids, jobs, mental health concerns, physical concerns, family, and blended family dynamics. Plus, issues from childhood keep showing up. 

The couple you would be and who you have become together have diverged. 

Now what?

Vulnerability and Courage Lead To Positive Change

 It can be very easy to shut down vulnerability and courage in a long-term marriage, yet these are the antidotes to what you are experiencing. They are not an overnight fix or magical cure-all. Rather, they are a process and way of being with each other. 

In long-term marriages, we will miss the mark and disappoint our partners and ourselves. These experiences of disappointment can shut down vulnerability and courage to be our authentic selves. 

For many of the couples we work with, the process of shutting down or blowing up in the face of missed expectations didn’t start in their marriages; it started in their families. 

Our clients learned from their parents and family that being vulnerable and displaying courage were strongly discouraged and sometimes dangerous. 

What we must recover to build a flourishing love and money life is the ability to experience and express both vulnerability and courage. The outcome of these is financial intimacy. 

Building Financial Intimacy

 Financial intimacy is a major ingredient in the success of long-term marriages. 

Financial intimacy takes a different approach than what most couples we work with have experienced. When asked what money conversations and decisions looked like in their families, most of the couples we work with express one of a couple of reactions: 

• Surprise and curiosity
• Sadness
• Overwhelm

Each reaction reflects what they saw, heard, and felt in their lives. 

What we don’t hear are stories of parents talking lovingly, openly, and collaboratively with each other about household finances, where partners mutually support each other's financial needs and goals. 

We hear stories about fathers controlling the money, giving allowances to mothers, being irresponsible with money, not paying child support/alimony, working endlessly, and being guarded and defensive about money topics.

We hear stories of mothers being controlling, being shopping buddies, working extra hard, being fearful about money, and also being guarded and defensive about money topics.

Now take some time to reflect on what you saw in your family as it relates to money. What did your spouse see in patterns around family and money? 

How have these experiences shaped each of your respective expectations about love and money?

Marriage and money are long games. Learning how to develop financial intimacy together will be a journey that depends on your starting point and frames of reference for what your responsibilities and expectations are of yourself and your partner. 

Reviewing Your Objective Numbers

Over the course of a long-term relationship, you will likely move through different financial seasons. Most couples hope to be making long-term progress towards their goals. When progress feels stalled or moves backward, it can feel defeating. It is what you do as a couple during this season that determines how future years play out. 

When couples view their financial life as a shared responsibility, they can work collaboratively together to figure out how to move through this season of setbacks. 

However, when you set up boundaries about what is and isn’t your responsibility when it comes to finances, it can unintentionally leave your partner feeling isolated and alone in solving the family's financial needs. 

Let’s meet Jonathan and Samantha, who have been married for 23 years and have three children 17, 14, and 12. Jonathan stays home to help manage the house and the kids while Samantha runs her very busy family medicine practice. 

It has been years since they have looked at their family’s net worth and retirement projections. Jonathan (as part of feeling like he is helping financially with the family) does all the family shopping, trip planning, and bill paying. He is also responsible for their retirement savings. Samantha loves her work and is feeling burned out and tired, but feels really uncomfortable talking about money.

Anytime Samantha expresses signs of burnout, Jonathan assures her everything is under control. 

In reality, things are not under control. The expected expenses of college are weighing on Jonathan, as well as their credit card debt, family trips that have gotten more and more expensive, and uncertainty about whether they have actually invested enough to meet their retirement goals. 

Samantha and Jonathan are seen as an ideal couple by their friends, with her successful medical practice, nice vacations, and their high-performing kids. There has been a growing disconnect between Samantha and Jonathan as each has become more focused on their roles for their family than their couple relationship. 

Recalibrating Goals and Expectations

 Jonathan and Samantha are ready for something different. They want their marriage to last in the long run, but they are both feeling some uncertainty about what the future holds for them. 

Like so many couples, Jonathan and Samantha need relational and financial support to go the distance with their relationship and money. 

They are good, smart people, but they need help. 

Together, they decide something’s got to give, and they don’t want it to be their marriage. 

Over the next couple of years, they start to take a long-game view of the relationship. They have invested in their kids and Samantha’s work as a doctor. Now it’s time to invest in their love and money. 

Together, they hire Healthy Love and Money to help them build relational connection and financial clarity. 

In the first months of working together, they don’t know what goals to set or expectations to have. They agree to be engaged in the process and discover what is important to both of them. 

It starts with courage and vulnerability on both of their parts. They realize they have both been guarding their hearts from being hurt by each other. They agree it has never been either of their intentions to hurt the other, but they have hurt each other. This was a major act of courage and vulnerability: to acknowledge the way they have impacted each other. 

As they learn to ask each other meaningful, heartfelt questions through their work with Healthy Love and Money, they come to see each other in new ways. 

Jonathan comes to learn and care for Samantha empathically as she shares how her alcoholic father would often criticize her mom for the way she spent money. Samantha realizes she made an unconscious promise to make great money so she would never have to count on a man for income like her mom did. At the same time, she would avoid looking at her transactions so she didn’t have to face her own self-judgment about spending. 

Samantha comes to appreciate that Jonathan grew up in a family where the stated expectation and reality was that men were to make and manage the money in the family. Jonathan hated how this felt and rebelled against the rule that men had to make all the money. He was initially interested in art before they had kids. Despite holding openly positive views of women making more money than men, silently it ate away at his confidence. 

In their exploration and understanding of themselves and each other, they came to see each other as more nuanced and complex people with diverse and sometimes conflicting views about the role and purpose of money in their lives. 

From this new depth of understanding and connection, they could then look at their objective finances together with much lower worries about how shame, fear, and disappointment would affect them as they looked at their money together. Jonathan was able to reassure Samantha that he would not become critical of her use of money. Samantha was able to acknowledge to Jonathan how he is doing a good job with managing the household finances and he could have more realistic expectations of himself not doing it perfectly. 

When they looked at their objective numbers, they realized and acknowledged that they had come a long way from their early years of marriage. Their net worth had grown over time, but it was not where they needed to be to reach some of their longer-term financial and retirement goals. 

With this awareness, they can build on their courage and vulnerability to recalibrate some of their current and future goals. Samantha can change her pace of work in her medical practice, and Jonathan could return to his passion as an artist and make money from his work. 

What would help you play the long game in your love and money journey?

We would love to help you. Schedule a free 30-minute consultation to learn how the Healthy Love and Money Team can help you move toward your love and money goals. 

Wishing You Healthy Love and Money,

Ed Coambs - MBA, MA, MS, CFP®, LMFT, CFT-I™

Founder - Healthy Love and Money