The money fights that can break up your marriage

At its heart, marriage is a business relationship.

It’s a prickly one, though. Resentments can bubble up over how each of you spends and saves (or doesn’t) and invests. It’s a territory rife with emotions. And for many couples, that makes for a delicate dance. It is for me and my husband, and we’ve been married for more than three decades.

I had the opportunity to sit down recently with Heather and Douglas Boneparth, an attorney and certified financial planner, respectively, to discuss their new book, “Money Together: How to Find Fairness in Your Relationship and Become an Unstoppable Financial Team.”

The millennial couple, both 40, and parents of two daughters, ages 9 and 6, turn a discerning eye to their own foibles and interview other couples about their money relationships. They also toss in advice from experts and lay out a blueprint for couples to navigate money conversations that can provide ballast to build and maintain a solid partnership.

Here are the edited excerpts of our conversation:

Kerry Hannon: Why do couples fight over money?

Heather Boneparth: Money is more than just money. Money is a manifestation of other feelings. Money may represent your values. It can represent your culture growing up. It can represent freedom and your desire for independence. It can represent shame if you have regrets over money.

When people are fighting about money, it’s usually not about spending or about a bill this month. There’s something deeper. That’s why fights about money are some of the most recurrent and systemic in relationships, and they’re the hardest to resolve because a lot of times we’re not saying the things that we really should be saying.

What are the keys to a meaningful conversation about money?

Doug Boneparth: You want to pick a place or an activity that is something you both look forward to doing. Heather and I enjoy walks. This is where we have these conversations. Frequency matters. You don’t want to have these conversations too often. You need to allow yourself enough time to see meaningful progress and change.

Heather: It’s more critical to have a quarterly discussion about this topic than it is to sit down every single week because by talking about this too often, you’re trying to force it in.

Doug: You have to get into the money-in and money-out discussion. People call that their budget or their cash flow. However, leading with these pieces of information in your discussion often is a mistake. Start by talking about goals and the things that you want to be working on together in order to then get into the conversation around how those numbers can make those goals happen. Start with the wins instead of things that need to be improved. Build momentum. What did we do right this quarter? What’s working well?