Shared despair, separate realities

We are remarkably meticulous about due diligence when it matters. We will research laptops and all sorts of tech gadgets before buying them. We will read lease agreements on different car models, compare insurance premiums, be petty about million insignificant and cheap purchases. We will apply logic, gather data, and weigh options about pretty much everything under the sun.

But then, one day, we will merge entire financial lives, take on shared debt for decades, and in many cases create human beings together — with someone we have never once asked a single tough and serious question.

We are not doing that because we’re stupid. There is another element to it: we’ve been systematically conditioned that asking uncomfortable questions before committing is unromantic, premature, and worst of it all — a sign that we don’t trust the person we supposedly love enough to build everything with.

And just like that, the most expensive conversation most couples will never have becomes a threat to the relationship before it even had a chance to happen. Ironically, it also becomes the one that creates all sorts of troubles along the line.

What love got to do with it

Pretty much nothing. Societal norms have spoken: you got to commit, then you got to procreate, as for compatibility — deal with it later, or perhaps not.

By the time you discover your partner wants fundamentally different things from life, you’re already emotionally invested, possibly financially entangled maybe even dependent, and trying to make incompatible systems work through sheer will, lots of therapy and some dark magic. We are on tight schedule, guys! Society pushes toward commitment at certain age regardless of actual alignment, so you end up making permanent financial decisions with someone whose goals you’ve never seriously examined, and for no other reason than for “the clock” saying it was time. Don’t you dare to question this. It’s just how it’s done.

Subsequently, the actual price tag of this ritual never gets mentioned. Not in abstract terms but in the concrete, compounding, decades-long financial reality of building a life on a completely unknown foundation.

It might be mortgage repayments on a property chosen together before you understood each other’s relationship with debt. Or children conceived with someone whose position on financial responsibility toward family you discovered only when it became a conflict. Add to that shared accounts that were never really shared — just merged, because that’s what couples do. All of this, while underlying assumptions about money, freedom, security, and obligation remained completely separate and private. Sure, more money or equal incomes very successfully mask these issues, making life liveable while the difficult questions wait patiently for difficult times.

Research discovered: couples argue about money

Believe it or not, there are actual studies about financial conflicts in relationships and about financial management of couples. Some of them elaborate in lengths about different financial management styles of couples, some of them state the obvious — financial conflicts can be detrimental for relationship, none of them discusses reasons for financial conflicts — fundamental incompatibility of people in a relationship.

Before my husband and I decided to live together, we had what I now recognise as a relationship system design session. At the time we called it “the conversation,” though it felt more like mutual interviewing for the most important position either of us would ever fill.

We didn’t talk about budgets. We talked about what we actually wanted from our lives — not what we thought we should want, but what genuinely drove us. Career ambitions, geographic flexibility, children, the role of extended family in our decision-making, what financial support for people we loved looked like in practice and where the limits were. How much each of us needed independence versus partnership in the financial decisions we’d make together.

Those were not romantic conversations and they shouldn’t be. They were specifications for compatibility. We were determining whether we could build a shared financial system or whether we’d waste years of our lives managing incompatible priorities and protecting ourselves from each other, until it finally tore us apart.

Once you cross that bridge, the actual money management is the easiest part. That doesn’t happen because we’re exceptionally compatible in everything or uniquely rational — we are definitely not, the ease comes from knowing what you can expect, not only when money isn’t an issue, but also when money is scarce or non-existing or when you have situation in front of you that demands from you to go against yourself but knowing that other person has your back.

Shocking: it’s rarely about money

This whole insanity of scheduled commitment doesn’t reflect in people making bad choices. We have constructed an entire culture around avoiding the uncomfortable — and then we treat the resulting financial conflicts as communication problems, budgeting failures, or character flaws rather than the predictable outcome of a system designed to skip the most important step.

You simply can’t engineer a financial life with someone whose life specifications you don’t know. Neither money nor lack of it are the issue. Money is just the most visible place where incompatible values eventually surface. The conflict you’re having about spending is rarely about spending. The tension around financial support for family members is rarely about the money itself. These are all compatibility questions that arrived late to the party, wearing financial costumes, because nobody bothered to check the dress code.

The most expensive conversation you never had was never the one about budgets or investment strategies or how to split expenses. It was always about what each of you actually wanted from the decades of togetherness — and whether those things can coexist without one person quietly funding the other’s vision at the expense of their own or constantly feeling that they somehow need to protect themselves.

Now, the math question: is the cost of having “the conversation” higher than the cost of not knowing?