Men often tell stories of wives who take off at the first sign of financial trouble. PHOTO/FILE
It is always such a pleasure to hear from readers. Some give me a
perspective of life that I might never have envisioned. A few have
(politely) told me off, but majority cheer me on.
Since
this column started, I have received a couple of similar emails from
different readers, emails which touch on money within marriage.
The
men who read my column, (and they are many!) often tell stories of
wives who take off at the first sign of financial trouble.
The
women however, write about husbands who disappear when they start
making good money. In both cases, I always wonder whether it is an issue
of perception or whether this is a reality.
One
reader, a man I will call Isaiah, gave me the go ahead to retell his
story. His wife of seven years packed and left him when he lost his job,
leaving their children behind, even though she later came back for
them. She even moved to another town.
“Before I lost my
job, we were happy, and she was loving and humble. I paid all the
bills, even though she had a job - I did not even know how much she
earned,” he wrote, and added,
“Once I lost my job, our
marriage became intolerable - my wife became extremely disrespectful to
me; it was as if I had become useless to her.”
What perturbed Isaiah about this sudden change in his wife was that early on in their marriage, his wife did not have a job.
He
had encouraged her to go back to school so that she could qualify for a
good job – he even went ahead and paid for her college education, and
when she graduated, she got a job.
Says Isaiah,
“She seemed to have forgotten this, and when I was down and broke, she took our kids and left me when I needed her most.”
Of
course, I only have his side of the story, which clearly shows that
financial strain is a major source of conflict in marriage, but so is
financial gain, as an email from a reader I will call Cathy,
demonstrates.
Her email read;
“For the
last 12 years, we have had a wonderful marriage. My husband was loving
and available for me and our three children. In fact, he never stayed
out late even when he met friends after work. As I write this, it has
been four months since I moved out of our matrimonial home. He is no
longer the man I knew.”
Cathy explains that her husband
started changing when a business he put up begun to do well. He quit
his job and decided to concentrate on the business, which flourished
even more.
Within a short time, she says, her husband became too busy, distracted and impatient with her and the children.
“I
though his business was taking too much of his time, but when I did
some digging, I found out that he was seeing other women.”
Arrogant
When
Cathy confronted her husband, he admitted that he was cheating on her,
and worse, he was not apologetic. He became rude, disrespectful and
arrogant, and finally, the insults degenerated to beatings. That is when
she walked out.
In our marriage, my husband is the
bold investor, and I, the risk averse, the saver. We fight about our
different ways of handling money.
I wish I had paid a
little more attention to my psychology lecturer, because I might be in a
better position to decipher why money distabilises so many
relationships.
Could it be that underneath the money
wars are bigger, unresolved issues in such marriages, and that the
pressure of too little or too much money is what acts as a catalyst for
the volcanic eruption?
Or is it that we give the pursuit of money prominence over investing in our relationships?
Is money a curse or a blessing?
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