Entering my 20s has been weird. Watching “What do you want to be when you grow up?” slowly morph into “What do you want to be next year?” has been terrifying. As I see people update their LinkedIn statuses to full-time positions at big companies and post pictures of engagement rings on their Instagram stories, I’ve been confronted with the daunting reality of my fleeting adolescence.
Part of this bookend might include moving in with my partner.
When we first started talking about living together, neither of us hesitated to say yes. It was exciting — sharing the same space was the official marker of a “grown-up” relationship. Yet however eager we were, there was one less-than-exciting conversation we needed to have: how to split our money.
Money is the biggest source of conflict in marriages, according to a 2017 Ramsey Solution study. The problem feels real, big and often unsolvable. So, to avoid the impending doom looming over my relationship, my partner and I needed to figure out how we were going to divide our money early.
The first step was a symbolic one, but we needed to shift how we viewed wages. There’s a cultural association between money and worth: The higher you’re paid, the more valuable of a person you are.
But that association is arbitrary. Earning more money than your partner doesn’t necessarily mean you’re working harder than them. I could spend my first couple of years post-graduation working in retail while he lands a high-paying job as a software engineer. Still, we’d both wake up early and come home late, exhausted and drained from a long day of work.
Considering the average Massachusetts salary for a retail worker is about $31,000 and an average salary for a software engineer is about $113,000, our wages wouldn’t reflect our work ethics. That $82,000 gap is significant.
With his salary and responsible financial management, he could live comfortably on his own, have adequate savings and afford to travel occasionally. Those on the average retail salary would be earning less than living wage.
Given these wages, it would be all too easy for an unhealthy power dynamic to appear in my relationship.
In Rachel Sherman’s “Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence,” she interviews wealthy couples about how they divide their money. We see Alexis — an upper-class housewife in New York City — talk about her spending habits. When she was interested in purchasing an expensive bag, her husband quickly “disciplined her desires.”
Reading this shocked me. The idea that she had to go through her husband for every purchase simply because she didn’t earn a salary felt deeply problematic. Legally, they were equally entitled to their funds, but in practice he had the final say. In my relationship, I wanted to avoid the clear divide between “his” and “hers.”
Sherman explains this uneven power structure as having to do with income as a measure of moral worth. What she found in her research was that participants believed “the most legitimate work [was] paid work, especially highly paid work, which [was] tied not only to effort but to individual self-sufficiency.”
Although her sample size consisted of wealthy Manhattanites, I believe this points to a broader culture. It’s easy to think your work contributes more to society when there’s a higher price tag attached to it.
So, my partner and I settled on our own wage system. We would share finances equally. We would organize our funds into a metaphorical money pile, pay for our bills and then divide the remainder in half.
It was a satisfying conclusion that we believed would best capture what we thought was above all true: We were both equal, active contributors in each other’s lives, and how much we earned at our jobs would not always reflect that.
Shifting to a money-pile model shifts the conversation from “my money” to “our money.” It’s a pronoun change that in the short term won’t be intuitive or easy for us to adapt to, but in the long term will spare us many sleepless nights bickering over how to divide rent.
