Advice on work, dating, friendships, and mental health from women who have failed spectacularly (and also succeeded) at all four.
Illustration: Lia Kantrowitz
Dear Amy Rose and Allison,
My partner and I are in our mid-30s. We’ve been together for over 15 years and started combining our finances after we got married five years ago. Our vastly different backgrounds have been a source of tension ever since. I’m the only child of a single mother who makes barely more than minimum wage. I’ve supported myself financially since I was 18, and I paid off my student loans in the last few years. My partner’s parents are upper-middle class. They put three kids through college and have owned multiple properties. They’ve provided money to support my husband at different times throughout our relationship. In general, I’m always in a scarcity mind-set, and he’s always in an “It will work out” mind-set.
In the past two years, as the cost of living rises, I’ve taken on more expenses for my mom, like household repairs and health care, because there just isn’t any other way. She’s aging, and her income is stagnant. My partner has been understanding and supportive of me helping my mom, but this one-sided expense means I can’t contribute to our shared financial goals. There’s nothing equivalent on his side: My partner’s parents are clearly not being hit by money stress in the same way. Instead, they’re asking us when we plan to buy property and have offered to help with a loan. Owning property isn’t a priority for me because I know I’ll have to keep supporting my mom as she ages. I’ve mentioned this to my in-laws, but they don’t seem to get it.
I don’t think they see themselves as being as well-off as they are. They imagine themselves to be middle class. I think they assume my mom is as well and imagine their son and I will build a life like theirs. Meanwhile, I feel like I’ll never have enough money for our life, let alone my mom’s. It’s like living in vastly different realities. How do I communicate to my in-laws how different my financial situation is from theirs, especially when I feel all this guilt and shame around it? I don’t know how to convey the extent to which I am and will continue to help my mom financially, other than quantifying it, and I don’t want to, for her sake.
Signed,
K-Shaped Worry Lines
Hi, K Lines.
I get it. It can feel disorienting to find yourself in the company of people who, exotically, haven’t experienced financial stress and the related risks that come with it, as most people in the U.S. have at some point. You can sometimes feel like you’re the exotic one when economic mobility is only becoming rarer.
Because I can sense it’ll affect the degree to which you’re able to trust me, let’s get my own class background out of the way. My family had a lot going on during my childhood, and I grew up really poor. I don’t need to do a whole J.D. Vance burlesque revue about my mee-maw for you here, but a few illustrative details: I didn’t reliably have electricity at home (wherever that was in a given year). By age 11, I was shoplifting groceries for myself and my sisters, like a Dickensian urchin in a five-for-$20 Wet Seal camisole with a built-in elasticized bra. I left for college at 17, got my first full-time job the day after I graduated, and am still paying my student loans for that escape hatch.
While I subsisted off of purloined Bagel Bites, my beloved partner attended a prep school with an annual tuition in line with my first salary. (I visited recently. There was a robotics hall!) Throughout our relationship, we’ve spoken frankly about money, and we try to account for the other person’s experience. I currently earn more than he does, but I’m not as financially secure in the long term, and I carry the inseparable terror and pride inherent to long-term financial self-reliance. So I know: Our partners can hear us out and empathize with us, but they’ve never felt that fraught combination firsthand, let alone dealt with the more tangible risks, limitations, and hardships of poverty.
You feel at least somewhat alone and misunderstood in this difficult, loving endeavor of supporting your mother, and I’m so sorry for that. It’s a lot to think through, when the responsibilities you’re taking on to help your mom are so present and you reasonably sense that they’ll only become more urgent as the years proceed.
It’s harder to trust that you won’t have to do all of this by yourself when you’ve always had to before. I’m in therapy in part to think through similar anxieties about stability. I always feel like I’m about to be evicted, though I’ve never once missed my rent in 17 years of paying it. (I can’t say the same for some of my wealthy friends. Once, one told me that she “just forgot.” She was right that it didn’t matter.) I’m obsessive about my Equifax score in a way I’ve never known a wealthy person to be. Most perniciously, I suspect that, if something slips, I’ll be the one holding the bag, so I behave accordingly: like everything is on me, all the time, and that it should be.
Part of the difficulty of your situation stems from how awkward it feels, and how far away your in-laws’ experiences seem from your own. You’re wondering how to gracefully communicate, in a way your in-laws (and, more to the point, your partner) can understand, a frequency of money-related stress that their ears cannot physically hear. Like a whistle pitched to reach only babies. You want to impart — crucially, without offending anyone by inadvertently commenting on their choices or means — that, whatever else is going on in your life, you have this frenzied ticker tape of worry going in your head at the same time. (I think of mine as “the Pauper’s NASDAQ.”)
And you’re maybe worried that your in-laws’ reactions to your mom’s situation will exacerbate your feeling of not belonging. Your in-laws might say something awful, or awfully judgmental, about your mother’s “life choices”; they might say something intended as a compliment that ends up stinging with condescension. It happens! Sometimes, in my run-ins with the upper crust, my lack of a certain pedigree comes to light, and all of a sudden, I hear a lot about how I’m “scrappy” and “resilient” rather than accomplished or just normal.
Don’t be hard on yourself over your sensitivities about this, which are borne of years of worry and vigilance. Those feelings are coloring more than just your guardedness about your in-laws right now, too. Even though you and your mom are cared for and safe, due to your own diligence, work, and consideration along with your partner’s buy-in and love, you don’t totally believe that it won’t come crashing down. This isn’t a character flaw! It’s science. The long-term psychological effects of childhood poverty are well-documented, and stress and anxiety are chief among them. Researchers sometimes call these internalizing factors, and they often mean that, over our lifetimes, we carry a greater “allostatic load,” even if our situations improve. Allostatic load is about the accumulative consequences of economic instability. When you’ve been stressed and anxious for long periods, it doesn’t wipe clean when things stabilize. It’s like wear and tear on an ACL. Also: Even when we get out of poverty, we often still have to handle the lingering ramifications of having been poor, including health problems that may have occurred as a result, debts, family dysfunction, family members who need financial help or other support — the list goes on. All that, in addition to whatever stress the rest of our lives, in their full splendor, deliver by way of health, work, annoying divas in our friend groups, and so on.
This is the slipperier difference in advantages between you and your husband, index funds aside. I’m not saying his life is a cakewalk, but he doesn’t have to deal with the Pauper’s NASDAQ.
So, despite what you know intellectually, despite what you’re telling yourself and your husband is telling you: You don’t totally believe your partner will be there for you or that he should be there for you, if you need help, including with your in-laws’ expectations. But I believe, based on what you’ve said about him, that he will.
The first step: Tell him you’re struggling with guilt, shame, and fearfulness about the future. You wrote to me that your partner sees your families as shared. That’s beautiful! Believe him, and let him be your equal and teammate, with all of these parents of yours. In recognition of your different circumstances, your partner can help you with the perceived stressors you actually don’t have to pile on top of what you’re already going through — namely, all this angst about your in-laws offering you a financial gift or leg up. That’s crucial to internalizing his support of and understanding toward your contributing to your mom’s expenses.
Your husband should take on addressing this with your in-laws himself. Ask him to talk to his parents privately about how they bring up money with the two of you. (In all things: The person who knew the family members first should usually be the one to talk to them about boundaries of any stripe.)
When I asked my boyfriend what he’d say in your husband’s shoes, his approach was interesting to me. Where I was most concerned with your sense of belonging and how isolating it can be to become part of a family when your circumstances have been so different from everyone else’s, my partner suggested investmentspeak. “It might help for them to hear this in a language they know,” he said. He wondered if it would land more squarely to have your husband elucidate that it’s impractical for you two to have your assets tied up in a house, with or without a loan. He should make clear that he hears the generosity and kindness in their offer, and that they’ve done so much to help already. From there, he can be firm that he’d prefer to tell them if your minds change, but you’d both like to leave the topic alone for now. Your in-laws sound like nice people who are a bit obtuse. Give them the benefit of the doubt! They don’t want you to feel this way based on something they’re trying to do to show you love.
Whatever happens from there: Please let your husband contribute more to your joint savings, if that’s what makes sense. It’s okay for your contributions to be equitable — not simply 50/50 — based on the whole financial picture of your income, existing assets, and ongoing expenses. Release your guilt about the kindness you and he are showing to your mother and her ongoing well-being, which he prioritizes, too.
You can feel better about this by having a straightforward conversation about whether he’s truly comfortable with what you’re spending to take care of her, and whether there are opportunities for the two of you to think together about what that looks like going forward. If the financial situation shakes such that it makes more sense that his support is simply better allocated to your joint savings, as it is now, that’s okay! But it’s good to keep checking in about this. You don’t want resentment to build on either side.
This ongoing conversation should also account for how you’re doing, not just the Suze Orman–coded pieces of this. Maybe he can ease your allostatic load by researching programs and resources to potentially subsidize your mom’s well-being. Or maybe he just needs to make clear to you more frequently that you can go to him as your partner and equal, and that he’s not going to leave you in the lurch or expect you to handle this all on your own. He loves you. Let him step up! If he falls short because he doesn’t know what this is like, that makes sense, too. You can help him understand by bringing him into your feelings about it more candidly and without accusation.
Money is so awful in how it can undermine our senses of self and our relationships with others. You’ve outsmarted the hand you’ve been dealt before. You don’t have to capitulate to it now. You’re not alone. As your past has already shown you: You’ve got options, and you can trust yourself (and others!) as you figure this out.
X ARS
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