How Wealth Can Negatively Impact Relationships

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Typically, the personal and lifestyle advantages of great affluence are conspicuously evident. What often flies beneath the radar is how uber-wealth may negatively impact relationship prosperity.

Unintended Consequences

The unintended consequences of great wealth often distract individuals, couples, and families from the deeper and more authentic gratification derived from emotional, verbal, and physical intimacy. This runs the gamut, but it includes the profound sharing of deep feelings that enable relationships to thrive and the enjoyment of romantic and sexual intimacy.

What informs my claim? Insights gleaned from working with a great many very high-net-worth families. Here’s what I often find.

For Families

Wealth affords enormous homes. The larger the home, the greater the distance between family members. Everyone certainly has their own bedroom, if not their own wing. Unlike yesteryear, when a family convened in the family room to watch television together—in my youth it was called the TV room—it’s more likely now that everyone is in their own room attached to their own devices. When houses range up to and beyond 10,000 square feet, you might no longer call out to each other but resort to intercoms.

This great distancing, made even worse by attachment to the cell phone, can desecrate familiarity, the essence of intimate familial bonding. Physical distancing often results in emotional distancing.

For Children

The unscripted adventures of two children sharing a bedroom often lead to a bond of incalculable value. With wealth, and even in middle-income families, such opportunity vanishes with each child having their own room. Privacy often precludes bonding. The set-up prompts the question, which room must the parent visit first for the proverbial tucking in or bedtime story?

As well, it can be an all-consuming, full-time job trying to assure the very best education for children. With wealth, expectations for children’s achievement may increase proportionally, and, sadly, most parents struggle to maintain balance. Parental aspirations and goals, although sensible at first, may remove parents from being truly present in the moment. As John Lennon sang, paraphrasing writer Alan Sanders, “Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.”

For Couples

As with most marriages, what begins initially as a romantic connection tends to devolve into a utilitarian, pragmatic relationship. We turn our attention to life’s demands, as we must. But wealth can exacerbate the loss of passion. Attention is likely no longer on just one home and decorating it but the enormous endeavor of purchasing, decorating, landscaping, and staffing multiple homes.

Another reward for financial abundance is travel, as it should be. But much time is spent in the planning of getaways. The strategizing and planning around financial matters can often take center stage, also ignoring the heart of the relationship.

Excessively busy and demanding lives tend to go hand in hand with affluence, often distracting from the core relationship. As a psychotherapist and marriage counselor, I’ve often seen how the gift of wealth may unsuspectingly lead to such great distraction that neither person is tending to the energy of the relationship. Just as you must stoke the logs in the fireplace to keep the fire going, when emotional and sexual intimacy become an afterthought, the flame of the relationship withers.

The Real Foundation

Emotional intimacy is the bedrock of thriving relationships. Wealth doesn’t bring happiness; resilient relationships do. The goal is to see wealth as the icing on the cake—not the cake itself.

I counsel my clients to navigate a balance from which their relationship remains their priority, lest they get swept away in the torrent of wealth-distracting matters. Attaining great wealth is a gift, but it can become a Trojan horse when we lose sight of what brought the couple together and how to secure the immense rewards of wonderful coupling and familial bonds.