DO NOT ALLOW MONEY DESTROY YOUR MARRIAGE

Secret bank accounts, hidden documents, fore closure notices, couples around the world are discovering shocking signs of financial infidelity.

Stephanie Cules, a successful career woman has got two kids, acquired landed properties and a production company built around her creative collaboration with her husband, their glamorous fast-paced life was the talk of the town until the night she took the dog out and grabbed her husband’s jacket instead of hers.

The coat felt strangely heavy and stiff, when Stephanie looked inside, she discovered the lining had been cut open and stuffed with a mail. “Out of this jacket comes out somebody else’s financial nightmare, except that my name was all over it: years of tax notices, eviction notices, repossession notices, tuition overdue notices, health insurance cancellation, we hadn’t had health insurance in eight months, and we were about to be evicted from our apartment,” she says. “We were three weeks away from living out in the apartment. It was horrifying.”

When she confronted her husband, he offered no explanation-shut down completely, she says.

Throughout their thirteen year relationship, Stephanie had managed their corporate business while her husband handled their personal finances. But while she signed their tax return every year, he apparently never filed them. “I had no idea I wasn’t paying taxes”, she said. Stephanie eventually learnt that their debts exceeded $100,000. she wondered what was wrong, but a few months later, her husband abruptly left her, and she found he had been having an affair. She is now getting a divorce and struggling to make sense of what happened.

“My life as I perceived it wasn’t my life”, she says. “All I thought we had and were wasn’t true at all”. Stephanie still can’t get over the fact that her husband never shared their financial troubles or let her help deal with them, a choice that left her feeling deeply betrayed.

That reaction is a telling sign of the times; in previous era, wives often had very different expectations. Back when everyone assumed that men made the money and the decisions, women didn’t necessarily believe they were entitled to share information, let alone power. But today, marriage is typically viewed as a partnership based on mutual trust, and when one partner violates that trust by keeping financial secrets, lying or making unilateral decisions that threaten a family’s welfare, the other partner can feel profoundly betrayed by a transgression that may be even more destabilizing than an affair.

Women are victimized more often than men. According to a study, 80% of women said their partners had lied to them about finances or debt. Among those who were deceived, more than 40% said it damaged the trust in their relationship, and for others, it resulted to divorce. It is not a one way thing though, men also fall victim to things of this nature.

Money is this massive pink elephant in some bedrooms and the problem had been heightened in the economic downturn, which is a painful backdrop for dealing with an issue that nobody wants to talk about.

The reasons for financial infidelity can vary. Some men conceal financial assets because they are secretly preparing to leave their wives, while others lie to their partners even as they remain committed to the relationship and expect it to survive.