As an individual and couples therapist people most often have come to
see me about relationship problems centered on sex, romance and intimacy. The two big issues were quality and quantity of a couple's sex life and to a lesser degree, sexual infidelity. Rage, shame, guilt, culpability, blame and hurt feelings were the emotions that accompanied most of these discussions over sexual issues.
Since the near collapse of the U.S. economy, however, money problems seem to dominate and endanger relationships. Love, romance, and sex have become secondary presenting problems of new patients and emerge as symptoms of breaches in a couple's financial partnership. The two biggest issues again are quality and quantity but of money, not sex and financial infidelity.
Joblessness, pay cuts, slashed bonuses, increased taxes, and drastic devaluation of the worth of people's homes and the size of their retirement accounts give any and all of us terrible feelings of powerlessness and loss of control. Suddenly there's fierce juggling to see who is going to be CEO of the couple's financial partnership. Deals between spouses are being renegotiated, not often to everyone's satisfaction.
According to matrimonial lawyer Lisa Zeiderman, an attorney at Johnson & Cohen, LLP, a White Plains, New York law firm, the current recession may be the final straw for many couples contemplating divorce. "Husbands and wives, previously content to complacently permit a spouse to make unilateral decisions about the family finances, are now taking a more proactive role in their family's financial decision making. Not only does this new relationship about the family's finances disrupt the marital status quo, but spouses are literally commencing divorce proceedings in order to assure themselves the ability to make financial decisions about their assets and spending." Couples cannot weather these tough times without a great deal of
resilience.
Resilience is achieved by following one fundamental rule: Your commitment to your relationship must be stronger than your personal history, frame of mind, or the burden of a distressed situation. If both partners acknowledge that there are times that will be difficult, that matrimony or partnership will demand that the well-being of the team overrides individual need, thought and feeling, then that couple will achieve the kind of resilience required to get through the most difficult of times.
"The failure to approach financial crisis with a team attitude is critical," according to Ms. Zeiderman. "It is the abandonment of that team approach that is leading the couples to divorce. Individuals who are no longer focused on the family unit but instead are panicked about their individual financial future are placing their marriage at great risk." The act of putting a relationship before personal need, feeling, or circumstances requires accepting personal responsibility and being accountable to yourself for the ways in which you are or are not stimulating progress and resolution to your current dilemma.
With personal responsibility also comes empowerment, because while we can't change others, we can change how we think or what we do with a problem with our partner. I hear people in my office say that their spouse needs to spend less or work more or is to blame because of past expenditures, job problems, or simply foolish investments. That approach just won't work, but harnessing a couple's history of resilience through life's crises can allow for a new normal to be found.
Time Magazine recently posed the question "Will the Market Kill Your Marriage." The article cites some frightening statistics and stories about the toll the financial crisis is taking on Americans. Finally at the
end of the article they take us full circle, right back to sex: the activity that is free and limitless and healthy for you. "If partner A does not know the full lay of the dire financial land, partner B should map it out while partner A makes a robust attempt not to scream. Then figure out how to address your liquidity issues as a team. All this honesty might even work as foreplay, suggests New Jersey sex therapist Sandra Leiblum, but if not, she recommends putting down the BlackBerry and reminding your spouse of something that's "free, burns calories, releases tension and creates bonds." Bonds that, luckily, can't be traded."
