It is a fact, universally acknowledged, that money is the primary reason for the demise of many love stories. And yet, this subject is so little discussed because it is seen as too vulgar and practical in the realm of eros. However, we are not merely disembodied spirits prancing in the ether; we are flesh and blood and must live on this earth and we must eat and we must be housed and we must visit the dentist sometimes.
There seems to be very little good advice given to young people in general about love, and those who do talk about financial prudence, seem to do so from the view that financial prudence and real, ego-defying, all encompassing love are antithetical to each other--that they cannot co-exist. Of course, this is not true and those people are not offering a solution to financial stain of raising a family, but avoiding the problem altogether by reject the family wholesale.
There are some simple, prudent principles about finance a couple must respect not only in order to preserve their relationship, but to help their families to thrive.
The first thing to realise is that neither exorbitant wealth nor abject poverty will insulate you from these problems. There are many wealthy families that lose their wealth entirely. There are many poor families that cause their children to suffer neglect in myriad ways because they were irresponsible.
You actually have to follow proper principles of financial prudence to overcome financial strains. And these may begin long long before you ever meet the one that you love...here they are:
Short Courtships
There are many discussions about who pays for the first date, who pays for the rest of the dates, who buys what gifts and when for each other. But these things are for people who are not together but separate. When you are separate, you have different bank accounts, different financial status, and different financial priorities and responsibilities. When you are together, all the money belongs to you both as a family. This mentality is useful for mitigating many issues and emphasises the importance of short courtships and marriage for any healthy couple in love.
If a couple spends too long dating, then suddenly, the number of dates begins to add up. Who is financing their activities? What right does the girl have to the boy to ask for help if she is struggling to pay for her rent? What right does the boy have to buy a new expensive and impractical car? What right do either of them have to go into debt or make big financial decisions independent of each other?
If you are dating someone, the silent implication is that you are dating to assess each other for marriage. If you don't foresee marrying the person you’re dating, you simply stop dating them. If you are planning to marry someone, then it follows that you will be sharing all your debts and assets, and the financial decisions one person makes will affect the other. As a result, what the person you're dating is doing financially is your business...except you have no right over them yet. The reason you have no right to expect or give anything to someone you're just dating is because you have made no serious vows of commitment to them, in front of a reputable authority.
When you are married, if one person works, and the other doesn't, any money they earn isn’t just theirs, it belongs to the family. The same is true if both people work. It is usually the husband who works because it is usually the wife who bears the brunt of looking after the children.
This is also why cohabitation is toxic for a couple in love. With cohabitation, more than anything else, financial expectations are muddled. The couple is living together, but splitting rent and bills like roomates. They are having sex like husband and wife, and separating everything else like unrelated strangers. They are pretending they can act both as families and as strangers and end up in a grey area of complexity that ends up playing a big role in destroying the relationship. Even if they end up getting married, it is statistically shown that couples that cohabitate before marriage have higher divorce rates. Part of the reason for that is likely the fact that they have practiced for so long using each other for sex and companionship while living as strangers that the old habits refused to die even in matrimony.
If you love someone, marry them.
Think about the Family and the Family’s future, not just Yourself
Many people when they are single make decisions purely for their own betterment and enjoyment. They do not think at all about their future family, and this is partly the reason why such people tend to have such a hard time both getting married and staying married. A self-centred person cannot form a part of a healthy family. People who think about their future family choose to spend their time (and money) in ways that will help their future family somehow. For example, they might learn skills that will either serve the family, or be able to make money. If they take on any kind of debt they are responsible with it.
The reality that many people forget is that a marriage is not just about two people becoming a couple, but rather one couple starting a family. That means it's not just the bride and groom involved in the marriage decisions, but also their future children.
Tom Wolfe is cited in the book Culture of Narcissism by Christopher Lasch, “most people, historically, have not lived their lives as if thinking, ‘I have only one life to live’. Instead, they have lived as if they are living their ancestors’ lives and their offspring’s lives”.
This means it is a very new phenomenon for everyone to be so concerned with themselves often over and against the interests of their family. While this kind of submersion of the will for the good of the family is taken to toxic degrees in Eastern Cultures such as in Chinese and in Indian families, it is important to note how frequently such families are able to at the very least keep and grow their wealth over generations. Western culture, in the traditional world when it produced not only stable, but wealthy and powerful, families, had a similar idea regarding the family as a superior end to contribute to rather than personal gratification.
The problem with Eastern families, and what takes them to toxic dimensions of abnegation, is that they are concerned not with the family’s flourishing financially and in other ways, but rather they are more concerned with the family’s reputation in their own parochial extended family circuits. They want their son to become and engineer or their daughter to become a doctor not because it will be good for their respective future families, but rather because it will give them prestige among their shitty little social circles. As a result, they often end up sabotaging their family's success not for individual selfishness, but for social vanity.
The Aristocratic Family
There is an excellent quote from scholar, Alexander De Tocqueville that perfectly describes the importance of the aristocratic family not merely for the flourishing of that individual family, but for society as a whole. Families are microcosms of society, and if individual families thrive, then the societies they belong to thrive. But the modern democratic idea of the nuclear family in which everyone is simply working for their own satisfaction in this togetherness contract, is an idea destined to fail.
“Amongst democratic nations new families are constantly springing up, others are constantly falling away, and all that remain change their condition; the woof of time is every instant broken, and the track of generations effaced. Those who went before are soon forgotten; of those who will come after no one has any idea: the interest of man is confined to those in close propinquity to himself.
As each class approximates to other classes, and intermingles with them, its members become indifferent and as strangers to one another. Aristocracy had made a chain of all the members of the community, from the peasant to the king: democracy breaks that chain, and severs every link of it. As social conditions become more equal, the number of persons increases who, although they are neither rich enough nor powerful enough to exercise any great influence over their fellow-creatures, have nevertheless acquired or retained sufficient education and fortune to satisfy their own wants.
They owe nothing to any man, they expect nothing from any man; they acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands. Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants, and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart."
Alexander de Toqueville, Democracy in America, Vol II, Section II, Chapter II
There are a few key ideas to take away from this quote when building your own aristocratic family. First, you are not just you, even when you are a single young person. You are an extension of all of your ancestors and the precursor for your descendants. You have a responsibility to both of these people in the chain of being, to not only be the most excellent version of yourself, but to do what you can to help your children as well. This is where we realize the errors of the boomers who believe their responsibility to their children ends when they reach age 18, and the errors of the millennials who weigh having children as the same kind of lifestyle choice as choosing to have a dog or not. “Will I enjoy it” is their only question to themselves. Whereas the aristocratic family asks much bigger questions of itself.
Second, the aristocratic family is one that can be distinguished from the democratic one because the aristocratic family accrues power within society. The reason that so many vile corporations and evil institutions have so much power today over our governments, laws and social culture is because we have all accepted being weaker as individuals rather than reframing how we view our relationships and unlocking the power of behaving as a proper family. Human beings aren’t merely social creatures, we are tribal ones. And to be a tribe means to be a family in more ways than just living under the same roof with your children until they turn 18. To be a family is to look out for each others interests, not just in the every day practical things, but on the level of nationhood and governance. And that all begins with how one bride and groom decide to treat each other and their finances.
What benefits the family must and should include the happiness and joy of its individual members, but these should not come at the cost of the whole family. For example, if the family is saving up to buy a house, and has a budgeting plan set aside to help with that, it would be irresponsible to divert a huge chunk of those savings for one person to buy a sports car, or another person to fund a designer label wardrobe. Those things can be planned for on their own, but these plans need to be made together, even if it’s just one person earning the money, it does not belong only to him or to her.
If you do not act like a family financially, you will break apart into the individual units you are acting as.
Plan Together, Win Together
Even if the husband is, rightfully, the leader of the household making all major financial decisions, it is crucial for the husband and wife to plan together. That way, they are both on the same page about what they are working on and what the long-term plans of the family are. Neither person should be in the dark, blindly following, because that results in either one person feeling exploited, or not appreciating the sacrifices being made. They say that in order to go far, you must go together, but that can only happen if both can see a picture of the end-goal.
Financial responsibility such as budgeting, making smart investments, managing debt and planning financial moves prudently are all skills downstream of these basic principles. People who are single know how to make money. But in order to do well together, and to benefit not only one generation but hopefully set up the many that come afterwards, one must not be near-sighted. One must make decisions like a far-sighted aristocrat. Look a little further than the distance between your eyes and the screen.