In the latest series of Love Is Blind, the reality show where people get engaged sight unseen, an important issue has been raised that is rarely given a platform: financial compatibility and honesty within a relationship.
In it, one of the participants, Stacy, had a conversation with her fiancé Izzy about their finances. Stacy comes from a wealthy family, saves a lot of her own salary, and is used to a luxurious lifestyle of designer handbags and travelling first class, while Izzy is younger, between jobs, and hasn’t anywhere near the accumulation of wealth as his new partner.
A conversation they have about money and expectations reveals just how important financial compatibility is in a relationship, particularly if it is long term. It is also evident how rare it is to have a conversation about it in the early stages, especially in heterosexual relationships. But the inevitable crumbling of Izzy and Stacy’s relationship as a consequence demonstrates how important it is in order to pre-empt much bigger problems down the line.
Money is as essential a conversation as discussing children and marriage, but is seen to be unromantic, awkward and clinical. Yet some of the biggest problems in a relationship can stem from money, whether that’s having different approaches to spending and saving, disparities in wealth, and something I can personally relate to: when a partner hides the amount of debt they are in.
Aside from the financial incompatibility, the most important part of the conversation between Stacy and Izzy was the revelation that Izzy lied about his finances. In the reunion episode which aired this week, Izzy tried to defend his actions by saying he didn’t have debt, he just had bad credit. I’m not sure if this is wilful ignorance, but in a marriage, a partner’s bad credit is something that should be disclosed, given that it impacts one’s ability to buy property, rent, or take out credit.
According to the kangaroo court of social media, Stacy had a lucky escape for many reasons, but the money issue was a big one. While I vehemently disagree with her expectation that a “man pays for the dinner” when going out (more on that later), I think how she proactively brought up the topic of money is something every woman should do, particularly if they date men. Too many of us don’t – either because we feel awkward doing so, or we worry we will put off the other person.
For women, this is a particular problem because we are socially conditioned to defer financial knowledge to men. In fact, women, on the whole, are more on top of their daily budgeting than men and are less impulsive with their spending, according to one 2019 poll. But they lack confidence when it comes to making investments and planning for the future.
A UBS Wealth Management study found that 58 per cent of women defer long-term financial decisions to their male spouses. There is a gender savings gap of 35 per cent, and the financial literacy gender gap is a real thing that many women aren’t aware of. The lack of confidence women feel around financial planning, coupled with earning less than men due to the gender pay gap, means they are more likely than men to end up in poverty when they are older.
I certainly fell into this category with my late husband, Rob. Despite being a feminist, I hadn’t noticed that in many financial matters, I defaulted to him knowing better, or more. It didn’t help that I found financial matters difficult and overwhelming to understand, and so it felt easier to leave it to him.
In a relationship, not knowing what your partner’s finances are like and how they spend can land you in a serious situation. At the start of our relationship, Rob seemed responsible with his finances, but as time went on, he became secretive about them. He refused to let me look at his bank statements and laughed it off as a joke, until eventually things came to a head when we were trying to sell the house he co-owned with a friend, in order to buy our own. He told me that he had acquired £30,000 worth of debt and that he had no way of paying it back. The debt, he said, was due to expenditures on our wedding, which baffled me as our parents had paid for most of it.
He sold his house and used the equity to pay off his debt, but ended up back in a similar amount of debt two years later. Except this time round, the truth came out: he had a secret drug addiction, which affected his ability to work, and he had been putting almost all of his expenditures on credit cards, which then spiralled out of control due to interest fees. When he told me what was going on, I felt sick. I was saddled with the consequences of his debt, even though I’d had nothing to do with it.
While that is an extreme situation, it is very important that women know what they are getting into when it comes to financial situations in a relationship. Part of why I feel so strongly that women must not fall into the trap of thinking it’s a win if a man pays for things is because Rob’s initial preference of paying for holidays and dinners meant that when it came to questioning him about certain things I thought were amiss, I didn’t feel as if I could ask him about it.
It was nothing he said or did – the strings that bound me were invisible. No matter what anyone says about love and equality, anything that involves an unequal share of money is transactional, and the price of that is your voice.
When you consider that women’s liberation has only been possible due to financial freedom, such as being able to work, own our own credit cards and have mortgages in our names, it is an own goal to give this autonomy freely away to a man.
Of course, that dynamic changes entirely when you are married and have shared assets. It gets even more complicated when you have kids, and perhaps one person is a homemaker while the other works. But even then, it’s important to have a conversation about whose name is on what, and how those assets are shared.
Financial compatibility and honesty may not be the easiest conversation, but the consequences of not having these conversations can be catastrophic. There are so many ways I wished I had handled my situation with Rob, but the truth was I didn’t know enough to advocate for myself and ask for what I needed. It’s why financial literacy is so vital for women.
Now I do know, and in any future relationship, if the other person cannot or will not discuss it, it gives me a very clear sign of whether or not we have a future together. And the answer is, probably not.