9 in 10 Millennial Couples Worry About Money
Student loans, wage gaps, two financial recessions, dual-income households, economic inequities add stress and complexity to relationships.
It’s not just you
Financial stress
Most couples are struggling to write their own rules for financial partnership in 2020. Life isn’t an episode of Leave it to Beaver and finances are more complex for millennial and gen Z couples than any prior generation.
Long before the COVID-19 pandemic, 88% of millennial couples reported money as a significant source of relationship stress.
Because people know this is a common issue in relationships, I’m often asked, “Isn’t money the #1 cause of divorce?”
Sort of — it’s indirect. Due to cultural factors, American couples have operated under the assumption that fixing financial issues will also fix related relationship issues.
It’s not that simple, unfortunately.
What’s the result of this oversimplification? Existing “solutions” are solving the wrong problem and have been, for a very long time. Many of these traditional solutions encourage couples to ignore vital messages from their brains — emotions.
Spoiler alert — humans have feelings
Staring at a spreadsheet, or mint.com, or Acorns (I really like Acorns, actually — and I’m a long time user. Full disclosure this is my referral link and I may get $5 if you signup through it.) usually won’t reach the heart of a disagreement. Budgets can’t explain why one partner feels lonely and misunderstood or angry or constantly sad.
Note that these are emotional experiences. These emotions are the thing causing friction with your partner — not logic.
Research shows relationship challenges related to money result from one or both partners struggling to cope with stress at the individual level.
One partner might have clinically diagnosable depression, anxiety, trauma, etc. or they may just have negative emotions that feel overwhelming. In either case, as the image shows, how someone reacts to — or is resilient to — stress is the dot that connects personal finance to relationship conflict.
As an analogy, money fights are like smoke billowing out of a house with smoke coming out the windows. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. The fire, in this case, is the emotional experience each partner is having. Just as smoke doesn’t burn down buildings, budgets don’t cause breakups.
Conflict does.
Pain does.
Those are the metaphorical fires. If you wait to put out the fire until there is smoke everywhere, the longer you wait, the more damage is done.
Preventing problems
The learning curve in forming healthy partnership habits can be steep, confusing, and distressing without support. Traditionally, couples spent years fumbling through, trying to make sense of their partner’s habits with money, expectations for saving, and so on.
Enriched Couples aims to help couples reduce trial and error to prevent distress. You do that by learning how to:
- navigate conversations about finances in a direct and healthy way
- develop and maintain healthy habits
- increase emotional intelligence
- build trust
- become more self-aware, including about your individual mental health
- strengthen the relationship foundation to weather future storms
Annette Miller is the Cofounder and CEO of Enriched Couples, a financial therapy platform that uses psychology to guide couples through unifying their values, financial priorities, and future goals.
