Good Financial Advice: Stay Happily Married

Small gestures for your spouse are the cement of any marriage

This article is going to be a big departure from my usual topics of life insurance and living benefits. I know, you might think, “who is he to be giving marriage advice?” Let’s get something straight. I’m not trying to give marriage advice; I’m just talking about small things that I have learnt through 13 years of marriage that might have saved our family from break-up and the financial devastation of divorce.

If there is one good piece of financial advice I heard in my life it was, “Stay married.” I would make a minor adjustment to that advice – Stay Happily Married. Just staying married doesn’t mean a couple are happy, and without harmony and unity in the marriage, finances can get way off track. People can keep separate accounts for totally separate agendas. Retirement isn’t planned together, and overall spending is not controlled for family values, but for individual wants and needs. Staying happily married allows financial planning to be a family affair, and saving and spending decisions are made together, with a plan for shared achievement of goals and dreams.

So, what’s with the banana bread?

By no means am I a role model for the perfect husband. I am too involved in my work, frequently inattentive, and seem to be unable to pick up on the smallest emotional cues of my wife. I know many of my failings, and others I am still blissfully unaware of (although I know my wife is trying to educate me on those ones too). What I have learned over my years is that every marriage has good times and it has bad times. It is in the bad times that a decision needs to be made – do you stick with your partner and rebuild your relationship (in some cases it requires total reinvention), or do you pack it in and find someone else to start over with?

I’ve always believed that you should stick with the trouble you know. There was a foundation on which a marriage originally built – love, passion, respect, admiration, etc. Finding those things again in the bad times seems like a very hard job, almost impossible, but it is certainly easier than finding those things out in the big bad world with people you don’t even know. And you shouldn’t have to do this all alone. Get some help – speak with a qualified professional who can give you some solid marriage counselling.

So, that leads me to my second financial tip – Paying from marriage counselling in MUCH cheaper than a divorce.

I thought this was an article about banana bread…

For most marriages there isn’t one big thing that destroys the relationship. A spouse doesn’t wake up one morning from a night of restful sleep, feeling refreshed and ready for the day, and says to them self, “I think I’m going to cheat on my spouse today.” Infidelity, for example, is usually the culmination of a long, slow slide into unhappiness, and the affections of another person seem so much better than struggling through another day with that “person” who makes you furious or hurt, day in and day out.

The long, slow decline of the relationship is usually a culmination of many little things. Little hurts, arguments, minor betrayals, which lead to mounting resentment. I know this because I’ve been there. There isn’t one big thing you can put your finger on and say this is when I fell out of love, because he/she did this! All those little things begin to add up, like debts owed to you, all accruing interest, and it builds and festers inside you creating an unending tide of negative emotions towards the person you should be in love with.

So, what can we do to rebuild a broken relationship and get back to being happily married?

Just give me the $100,000 banana bread recipe already.

Again, I’m no counsellor, and I don’t have a magic pill to prescribe you and all will be well again (again I advocate getting marriage counselling if you’re unhappy). It just seems logical to me to counteract all the little negatives with intentional little positives. Now, I said intentional positives. If you accidentally do something that wins your spouse’s approval, but you never intended to do it, it doesn’t count (like being awarded a vacation from work for being a workaholic). And, just to make things more complicated, you have to do your intentional positive act with a giving heart, and no expectation of reciprocity. That is, do something special, intentionally for your partner, without any other agenda except to make him or her happy.

So, here is what I did on the weekend. I made banana bread. Not just any banana bread, but the banana nut bread my wife loves. She likes my banana bread over anything you can get at the store, at Starbucks, even at the school’s bake sale (I’m not bragging or nothing but it is really good banana bread – come over to my house and try for yourself). I made a special trip to the grocery store to get the ingredients, and while she was out at yoga I whipped up my killer banana bread. I also made sure I cleaned up after myself, because who likes to come home to a messy kitchen. Yes, making banana bread is a small thing – very small in the whole scheme of things, but it was one small positive thing I did intentionally for her. Next time it won’t be banana bread but something else – also worth $100,000. It’s worth so much more to make a small step in a positive direction towards your spouse. And then make another step, and another. And before you know it you’re a mile away from the edge of the cliff your marriage was dangling so precariously from.

DON’T call Life Guard Insurance for marriage advice OR my banana bread recipe

Here at Life Guard Insurance we are insurance brokers and financial planners. We help you protect your loved ones and save for your future. But we are people too. We have been through the same challenges, the same ups and downs as all of you. Just because you don’t feel comfortable sharing your marital troubles with your insurance broker doesn’t mean they are irrelevant to the financial planning process. Divorce has a major negative effect on your finances. There is some truth in the old proverb, “Only the lawyers win in a divorce.” We just want to encourage you, if you’re facing marital difficulty; it’s worth your real genuine effort to make things better than just give up.

So, in conclusion, I just want to ask you this – what’s your $100,000 banana bread? Can you bake it for your partner today?

The article was written by +Mitch Reynolds. If you found this article interesting or it made you think, please feel free to share your comments below. Liking us on Facebook, giving us a +1 on Google or Tweeting this article about staying happily married would be very much appreciated.

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