The Economic Facts of Life

Published June 29, 1979. Almost everyone knows that money can’t buy happiness. We are also becoming increasingly aware that neither can poverty.

When it comes to marriage and money, the clichés abound. We have been told that “Two can live as cheaply as one.” And after marriage “You can live on love.” And somewhere we remember hearing that “Money is the root of all evil.” It is evident to many counselors and educators, however, that the lack of a stable income or the inability to manage money can undo the very best of marriages.

Money and its sound management are essential to the achievement of personal fulfillment as well as marital stability. Marriage counselors and family service agencies generally agree that economic stress is one of the main causes of conflict in American marriages, despite the fact that we have an affluent society. Many studies indicate that married couples quarrel over money more than anything else and that economic factors are closely related to marital stability. Economic disruption is also frequently a major cause of divorce.

Married couples in the middle and upper classes are equally susceptible to financial problems. There is a myth that if more money is acquired, then people will be happy. This is rarely the case because  as Parkinson noted, expenditures usually rise to meet the income. And no matter how much a couple earns, they usually will want more.

At some point, each of us must learn to live on a specific income and begin to say “no” to escalated desires for material gains. Income, debt, and lifestyle must be reconciled.

Another observation about marriage and money was disclosed to me not long ago by a friend who has a newly married daughter. He noted the fallacy that every family budget can be continually stretched. His daughter and her new husband are scraping to get by during their early years of marriage. They are living on a meager income and constantly are trying to cut down on their budget.

My friend observed that most things we stretch in life have a breaking point if the stretching continues. Such is the case, he said, with budgets. His married daughter and son-in-law learned to do without many things, but they are at the point where they can no longer economize without creating severe emotional, physical, or relationship imbalance. It is difficult to trim a budget, he noted, when it is already down to the bone.

Other married couples may be in a similar situation. It then becomes a matter of increasing the income to meet the budget through additional employment or by retraining for a better-paying job. However it is resolved, the income may have to be increased to meet the budget, rather than constantly trying to lower the budget to accommodate the income.

To some degree, attitudes and habits involving money can be ascertained before marriage. I  advise the young women in my marriage classes to become concerned not only with how a potential husband parts his hair, but also become aware of how he parts with his money. It frequently seems there are more Scrooges than there are stories of “The Christmas Carol.”

I also encourage the young men in my classes to gain some insights of a potential wife’s attitude toward money. Can he afford to give her the lifestyle to which she is accustomed? To what degree will she expect her parents to continue giving her money after marriage for those things her husband cannot afford?

As for the myth “Two can live as cheaply as one,” we simply add, “for half as long.” The idea that you can “live on love” may also be true if either or both are willing to physically starve a good portion of the time.

And is money really the root of all evil? The often misquoted phrase is a statement of Paul’s in the New Testament. Not money, but “the love of money,” Paul observed, “is the root of all evil” (1Timothy 6:10). George Bernard Shaw once wrote that “The lack of money is the root of all evil.”

In his text on marital relations, “The Individual, Marriage, and the Family,” Lloyd Saxton makes the following summary of marriage and money.

“The ‘facts of life’ that a young couple encounter when they strike out on their own is not only the birds-and-bees world of mature sexual relations, but the dollar-and-cents world of economic reality. The ‘real world’ is the world of wresting a life from the culture, as a breadwinner and as a consumer.”