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Relationships have innumerable challenges. Their longevity can be affected by a number of factors. Infidelity is one of them.
We’ve seen the movies where the lead actress is figuring out what’s going on. She’s finding lipstick on his collars and receipts in his pockets. There’s a necklace that he bought and gave to someone else, the hotel receipts for the honeymoon suite on what was supposed to be a business trip, and receipts for flowers she certainly never received. It snowballs. She checks his phone messages, tries to hack into his email, and maybe even attempts to follow him—all in an attempt to confirm what she already knows. He hasn’t been faithful.
While I’ve been fortunate enough not to experience this specific scenario in long-term relationships, I have experienced an almost identical one on two different occasions in my past. In both scenarios, I had an intuition that something wasn’t quite adding up, but all I had in the beginning was that feeling. Then, it grew. There was evidence, even if I didn’t want to see it or didn’t want to admit that it meant what I thought it meant. But as that feeling grew and the evidence piled up, I became hyper-vigilant, always looking for the signs.
It’s called financial infidelity.
In most partnerships, it’s expected that financial decisions will be discussed and agreed upon or at least openly acknowledged. Financial infidelity occurs when a partner hides their often negative relationship with money. Maybe they went out and bought a new car you can’t afford without discussing it first. Or they’ve been running up the credit cards without your knowledge. Regardless of how it happens, financial infidelity creates instability in the relationship and causes trust issues.
The first time it happened to me was in a previous relationship. I had no idea of the extent of my partner’s poor handling of money because he hid his massive credit card debt from me. He also tended to lie about purchases—telling me that they were inexpensive, given by friends, or even omitting the truth by hiding them away.
He was also manipulative in other respects. He would claim that he was short of funds so that I would pay for dinners and vacations, all the while having plenty of extra funds for his own entertainment and interests. He would call up a relative and complain about not having enough to pay for bills so that he could manipulate that person into sending him money. His own money was for himself, and other people were simply a tool to be used to get more of what he wanted. Meanwhile, he was sending us into financial devastation without any real attempt to clean up his act.
When I finally broke free of this situation, I decided to address my own relationship with money. I didn’t run up credit card debt that couldn’t be paid off by the end of the month. I learned to shop sales and consignment. I downloaded rebate and coupon apps and made use of them. I figured out how to take a poor relationship with money and turn it into a positive one. I started saving more than spending and amassed a healthy nest egg.
Then I met the next setback, which is how I’m thinking about the situation at the moment. In this relationship, what he said about money didn’t align with his behaviors. Slowly, I found my money siphoned off to fulfill his goals, always with the promise that I would be paid back. When payment failed to be made month after month, I began to realize, with a growing sense of horror, that while my own relationship with money had improved, my boundaries had not. I had been put at risk again by someone who was adept at financial infidelity.
All the signs were there. In the end, I was left with a large debt, no savings, and other people telling me about the debt he owed them, too. My trust was destroyed. How had I managed to be cheated on a second time with money as the mistress? Why couldn’t my partners choose me rather than choosing to develop an increasingly negative relationship with debt and wasteful spending?
Many of us have negative relationships with money. We borrow on credit to pay for lavish holidays, or we tell ourselves that we’re owed a big, expensive vacation each year. We spend when we should save and treat debt as if it’s something we can always address in a more financially stable future.
The thing is that we’re not creating that financially stable future for ourselves. Instead, we’re self-sabotaging, and when we lie to our partners about our spending habits, we’re sabotaging both our financial future and the future of our relationships. I had to end a relationship where I still had a lot of love because I was unwilling to continue amassing debt and watching my savings siphoned away with no hope of return. I could not trust him to be faithful with money or to fix the situation because months of lying had gone into making it what it was.
And it was heartbreaking.
But when our partner’s mistress (or mister) is money and not another person, how do we fight back? We can’t exactly tell money to take a hike. We can’t even ask that our partners stop having a relationship with money. So what can we do?
We can insist on couples counseling.
Trust has been damaged. Work will need to be done to repair the relationship, and it can help to have a third party there to help us do it.
We can insist on financial counseling.
If the other person is willing to address their harmful behaviors, they need to be willing to address them with professionals and figure out a way out of the debt that doesn’t involve some kind of debt consolidation scam. If they were capable of doing it alone, we wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place. Financial counseling and couples counseling need to be put in place to address the trust and the harmful financial relationship.
We can decide what we’re capable of living with.
If the other person doesn’t see the harm in their behavior, we have to decide if we’re willing to live with this degree of financial instability. I wasn’t. I have two children who depend on me, and I’d already gambled with their financial future by allowing someone else to wreak havoc on it. For me, there was only one choice, although it was one of the most painful choices I’ve made.
We can address our own boundary issues.
In some situations of financial infidelity, we genuinely have no idea what’s going on. In others, we see the signs that the other person isn’t responsible with money, but we don’t heed them. We need to work on having healthy boundaries so that we protect ourselves with separate savings that cannot be touched by someone who may be prone to spend it. We can also make sure that we don’t loan money to those who haven’t proven that they are trustworthy.
We can learn to address our own financial relationship.
While we’re dealing with financial infidelity, it can be a good time to assess our own relationship with money and how we might improve it. Maybe we’ve avoided starting an emergency savings account or saving for retirement. Maybe we preach the value of savings but have failed to teach it to our children by helping them set up a savings account of their own. We can make sure that we have a healthy relationship with money that involves openly communicating with our partner about our goals and wishes when it comes to our financial future.
When the mistress (or mister) is money, it doesn’t have to end the relationship. There are ways to work through it, provided the other person acknowledges their mistake and is willing to do whatever it takes to work through it. Again, what it takes shouldn’t be on their terms. After all, they haven’t proven to be trustworthy or reliable to this point. The terms should be whatever you, as the partner who was effectively cheated on, decide is adequate. That could mean couples counseling, financial counseling, and relationship rules on how to handle money.
Whatever you determine, the other person has to have a willingness to participate for it to be effective. Counseling efforts will be collaborative, but the terms of proceeding in the relationship need to also be mutually agreed upon. The cheating partner doesn’t get to have it all his or her way.
It’s not impossible to recover from this sort of setback, but it is a challenge. Sometimes, we’re not looking for lipstick on collars. Sometimes we’re looking for signs that the person is falling back into that instant gratification attitude with money that often leads to a recurring problem. Spending can be an addiction, too, and our attitudes toward fixing it need to be as serious as dealing with any other problem, including garden-variety infidelity.
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This post was originally published on medium.com, and is republished here with the author’s permission.
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