When Money Masks Couples’ Real Problems

by Martha Baer

Not that he, an inveterate non-shopper, could really identify—but he could sense that they’d broken up over something far more painful and psychologically ingrained than poor money management skills. “One time she said to me, ‘I feel like I’m nothing,’” Dan remembers, flooded with sympathy. “It was like when she bought something, she was trying to increase her presence in the world.”

In this divorce-happy age, conventional wisdom targets financial issues as one of the leading causes of marital breakups. But my cousin’s story—extreme though it is—suggests that if you peel back the layers, you almost always find that there’s much more than money disturbing the peace. In fact, the only study on divorce that used real-time data (as opposed to relying on couples’ memories of their rifts) found only a tiny correlation between financial problems and failed marriage. At the beginning of the 12-year study, conducted by consumer economist Jan Andersen of California State University in Sacramento, all the participants were married.

At various points in time, the more than 2,000 randomly chosen couples answered a long slate of questions about their marital stability, concerning everything from their health to their church attendance to, of course, their financial habits. When Andersen looked closely at the results, he got a surprise: Only a tiny number of couples that logged negative responses on the money questions wound up divorced.

“I was a little disappointed,” Andersen confesses. “I had believed, just like everybody else, that money was the problem.” But he soon began to see money as one of many factors—along with issues like sex and in-laws—that contribute to a “stress threshold,” above which divorce tends to occur. “We do know that couples fight about money, and I think if we get them to handle it better, we could reduce the level of stress,” Andersen says. But ultimately, he concludes, “Money may just be a mask.” Many therapists agree.

Lois Gold, for instance, has particular insight into why people split up. She not only coaches couples still struggling to make their relationships work, but is also a licensed therapist and divorce mediator (which means she can facilitate a divorce, lightening the load of family courts and hopefully making the process less ugly). Over the past 25 years, Gold has handled more than 1,200 mediations between spouses who are certain their troubles can’t be fixed, and has written a book called Between Love & Hate: A Guide To Civilized Divorce.