Sorry, bad summarization on my part. (I thought someone had explicitly suggested that, but I guess not if you say so.) Put in: open a separate account to move money to or put money in. Doesn’t really change my point.
The absolutely disgraceful amount of strawmanning that goes on around here* (not by you) does make it hard to keep clear who has said something, and who has been strawmanned as if they had said something.
*… and, to be fair, in all debate everywhere
I agree–and when you and @Sam_Stone and I all agree on something, you know there’s something going on!
The more I read folks sneer at her “woo,” the more annoyed I get at folks.
I think about it from my perspective. I came into a little bit of unexpected money at the end of this school year, and I decided to buy a Nintendo Switch and a game. Coincidentally, it worked out to about the same price as a crystal globe. My wife does not play video games, so this is for me, not her. (Well, it’s also for our children, but my wife will get no joy from it). Just like the crystal globe is for Akaj’s wife, not for him.
There are some differences.
One of them is not that it’s “my money.” My wife and I are married, and we run a household jointly. Who brings the money in is morally irrelevant.
But both of us (I think) handled the purchase better than the crystal globe purchase. Before I ordered the Switch, I checked in with my wife. It’s not a game-breaking purchase, but it’s big enough that I wanted to make sure she wouldn’t be stressed about it. That’s the first difference.
The second difference is, although my wife doesn’t play video games, she knows I get pleasure from them, and she wants me to be happy, so she didn’t sneer at my purchase. I can’t tell whether @Akaj is letting his disdain for “woo nonsense” (from the OP) show, but I suspect it is. Rather than considering the purchase as a way to make her happy, like Breath of the Wild does for me, he’s thinking about it in terms of whether it’s “real.” Which is not a good take, IMO.
I definitely think the “virtue” of the purchase (or the “validity”, or the “scientific rationale,” or whatever) should be ignored. Calling it “woo nonsense” is showing pretty strong disrespect for something she finds important, and it’s gonna be hard to have a calm conversation about the financial aspects if that’s in your mind.
Again: I’m not saying she handled it perfectly. It would’ve been better had she checked with you before making a several-hundred-dollar purchase. But I think that moving forward is gonna require recalibrating the discussion, leaving out the “woo nonsense” factor entirely.
Finally,
I don’t like that much at all. A joint household has joint finances, and tracking who’s bringing in what money is not a recipe for a happy marriage, IMO. If she’s not contributing to the household in some significant way, e.g., maybe she does the lion’s share of the housekeeping work (does she?), that’s an issue; but if she’s maintaining your household in non-financial ways, it seems weirdly punitive to say she doesn’t get to share in the financial fruits of the household.
I dunno, that looks suspiciously like:
This nuclear option is all about Akaj taking the household money, denying Mrs. A access, and unilaterally deciding how it should be spent. Whether a court of law would step in after Mrs. A sues Akaj is beside the point. That sort of dispute doesn’t get solved in civil court, it gets solved in divorce court.
We all know that many married couples have personal bank accounts and/or joint accounts, but these are willing open choices by the couple. They are not one sided decisions by the primary earner to deny an unwilling spouse access to funds. It’s not a nuclear option that might just save the marriage, it’s a nuclear option that blows the marriage to smithereens. It’s a fair option if he’s decided on divorce, and wants to protect assets from a spouse who would spend everything, not just the 50% they would be entitled to in the divorce.
What I think you’re missing here is that a strong belief in one type of woo (no scare quotes for me, thanks) often is accompanied by or develops into an attraction for other types of woo (look up crank magnetism).
Such a person on developing an illness may invest considerable time and money in pursuing useless and even dangerous alt med remedies, while ignoring evidence-based medicine that could be life-saving. Glomming onto health woo may make them feel fulfilled and happy, but the outcome is liable to be poor.
The second and more obvious point is that when one’s avocations put a severe strain on a relationship (financial or otherwise), it’s no longer just a matter of indulging what makes that person happy.
Sorry I edited my post (but, strangely, well before you posted) after I realised I had erroneously made it sound like I meant that the OP keep the rest of the money. Read my post again now and you will see what I’m getting at.
I was thinking about a different Rational Wiki article.
Understood, it’s rather more agreeable with the edit.
With my job, for example, I have a percentage automatically taken out for a 401k, it never even hits our joint bank account. Since it’s my wages, I’m fully in control of that percentage, and I’m in control of what the 401k is invested in.
It may still take some doing to get agreement for a homegrown solution similar to my standard corporate retirement planning, but it isn’t inherently unreasonable.
Don’t forget this one.
I explicitly disagree and think that for this discussion @Akaj should forget that one, for the reasons I’ve already stated. This ain’t your marriage, Jack, it’s his, and if he’s going to be as sneeringly contemptuous of her beliefs as you are, it’ll be fatal to that marriage.
Years and years ago I posted about my grief when my husband was not ready to have a baby. We started talking about having kids when we were 23 and at 29 he was in a horrible PhD program and still didn’t have the bandwidth. Some of the things people said to me were bonkers. I was on my last year of graduate school and someone suggested I quit graduate school and have a baby since I was clearly not anything but a “dilettante” social worker, many recommended I give him an ultimatum, and leave him if he refused, though I had no intention of abandoning an otherwise solid relationship, and I was also declared abnormal for not being willing to leave him and have a baby with someone else. It was really eye-opening, in the sense of many people in relationship threads just cannot see anything in the OP but what they went through personally.
When I look at the OP I see a lady with an overspending problem. I don’t see any evidence of a mental illness, just a different (and admittedly woo) way of looking at the world, but her particular beliefs are beside the point. She needs to recognize that her “energy” is not the only energy that matters. I see no reason to throw out the whole woman.
(Still married… Going on 17 years now. It did take forever to have the kid, we were 37 when Wee Weasel was born, but he is the best kid, and he was worth the wait. And my husband was right, it was better to wait. I was unable to see that at the time because of my longing to have a child. I was a lot less emotionally mature then.)
i have provided a cite that his earnings are likely marital property, which she has rights to.
Perhaps the technical legal term isn’t “stealing” but “inappropriate control”. But “stealing” is also a common word with a common meaning. When I get a phone call telling me my windows computer needs to download this software right now, I ask the guy on the phone “does your mother know you steal from old ladies for a living?”, even though it’s probably technically fraud and he probably commits it against old men and mentally disabled people of all age.
Also, as others have pointed out, taking all their money and putting it into an account that only he has access to, without her prior approval, is likely to lead to divorce, and then the divorce court will give a lot of it back to her. I suppose if divorce is immanent and he is afraid she will squander all of their money before they can split up, it might be a reasonable thing for him to do. But it really doesn’t sound like that’s where they are.
And as a woman, I get really upset by men talking about their right to control “their” marital income because they think their wife is doing something frivolous. So yes, I am perhaps not responding completely rationally, because y’all are talking about evil misogynist stuff that makes me see red. Even though I have been the primary earner for most of my marriage.
Note that the OP isn’t doing that. He has a complaint that might be completely reasonable, and all his posts sound perfectly fine from the perspective of a guy who is frustrated with his interactions with his wife.
I think there have been three constructive suggestions:
-
try to talk about your underlying needs in her language. That means talking about the OP’s need to feel financially secure, rather than presuming that they are on the same page about current spending vs. savings.
-
consider a family budget with each party have some money they can spend on stuff they want without judgement, and with limits on how much that is.
-
consider therapy. An objective third party may be able to help them navigate these shoals.
And in the spirit of reading into things, OP, does your wife by any chance have ADHD? This often goes hand in hand with overspending so it may be worth looking into. One thing I didn’t know before I was diagnosed is that you don’t have to be hyperactive to have ADHD, there’s also an Innatentive type which might also involve hyper-fixation on a specific interest and maybe getting distracted by $350 crystal balls and lacking the impulse control not to buy them.
If I can add onto this: talk about it without assuming your needs are more valid.
Consider how someone might respond to two approaches:
- “I can understand spending on dinners and concerts and such, but these woo nonsense purchases? They’re threatening our financial security. If you’re not bringing in enough money to pay for them, you should stop spending money on them.”
- “I understand that this is important to you. Your happiness is important to me–but also, financial security is important to me. Can we talk about a way that we can both get our needs met here?”
The first approach is almost certainly going to lead to a fight. There might still be a fight with the second approach, but it’s a lot likelier IMO to lead to a productive conversation.
FWIW, there are a few folks on the board who give excellent relationship advice, and you’re one of them. Even when it’s not about my relationship, I always feel wiser for reading what you write.
The roadmap/blueprint I learned for communication is to say something positive, use I statements, show understanding, share responsibility (PIUS-Positive, I, Understanding, Sharing). Start with a genuine positive statement about the person; take ownership of your feelings by using “I” statements instead of accusatory “you are doing this/that, etc.”, demonstrate empathy by using understanding statements, and then, in the solution, involve yourself in it so you have skin in the game, and it’s not just a unilateral “you have to change!” You are part of the situation, and it is helpful to acknowledge it.
Statement number two has most of that there. I personally find breaking down what to say in this way helpful, and since learning it a couple years ago, I’ve found it has demonstrably led to better communication with my wife, when I slow myself down to employ it. Just keeping in mind those points and stopping to think about what you want to say and how you want to say it has saved me a lot of grief. It’s of course not guaranteed to work, but I do think it gives you a better chance than many approaches.
But those don’t have the right psychic energy. You need to buy my special cards that have been kept in a pyramid, and next to a pure crystal of dolomite. These enfused cards are the only ones that work, and I’ll let you have them for 3 payments of $78.95.
You have provided a cite for the proposition that a situation that hasn’t and hopefully never will arise would give rise to rights that don’t currently exist. That is, you have provided a cite that refutes your own wrong contention that such a right could be infringed now.
There are no indications you recognise the breathtaking irony of leveling an accusation of theft against someone who would preserve potential marital property by saving it for their mutual retirement, from their spendthrift spouse who would dissipate it unilaterally.
The sexism in your and other posts is bemusing. The situation faced by the OP, and the possible responses being discussed here, can occur and are applicable to situations where the genders of those involved in any given role are interchangeable. Plenty of wives have had exactly comparable problems with husbands and had similar advice given.
She’s never been diagnosed with that, but she has struggled with depression and currently takes Prozac. I suspect with no evidence whatsoever that many of her impulsive online purchases (not the $350 crystal ball) are basically little dopamine hits that give her a boost when she’s feeling down.
Feel free to ignore my advice, but this is maybe “take a breath and step back” time. That’s all I’ll say on the subject.