Achieving Happiness Column for 12-12-04 By Tom Muha, Ph.D. MONEY PROBLEMS MAKING YOU MISERABLE How much is your significant other spending on the holidays? The chances are that you don’t know, and that you’ll be unpleasantly surprised when you find out. The most frequent source of conflict among couples is around money. Trust in a relationship is more often broken by financial betrayal than sexual infidelity. Couples rarely discuss money until a problem surfaces that’s upsetting to them, which is hardly the best time to talk about such an important issue. Many times financial problems occur because people aren’t paying attention to how much they’re spending. Cindy fell into that trap last year with her holiday shopping. “I wanted everybody to be pleased,” she remembered, “so I just kept buying gifts because I thought it would make our family happy. But when the credit card bills came, it almost caused a divorce.” Because Cindy and her husband Jack had avoided discussing a budget before the holidays, the amount they spent was shocking to both of them. Jack was furious, and put the blame entirely on Cindy, who adamantly defended her position by insisting that she was only thinking of others.  It took months to dig them selves out of debt, and the underlying resentment seriously eroded their relationship. They finally resolved their standoff when they were each able to take responsibility for their own contribution to creating the problem. Jack acknowledged that he had abdicated responsibility by not negotiating a budget beforehand. Cindy eventually came to see that shopping was like having an affair, it was an extramarital activity that had become her primary source of satisfaction. Financial self-control is tough today for several reasons. The media has successfully promoted the erroneous concept that self-fulfillment and social acceptance can be found by acquiring material possessions. Most Americans mistakenly believe that they must have what their friends have, which causes their wants to mutate into needs. This distorted perception makes it seem plausible to spend substantial sums on luxury items such as expensive clothes, automobiles, jewelry, and home furnishings. As seductive as these prized possessions may be, they actually take a devastating toll on personal happiness and relationship stability. Materialism produces a pressure to continue consuming in order to feel satisfied. This, in turn, pushes people to work longer and harder, which diverts their time and energy away from engaging in activities which will bring them authentic happiness. Most people, for example, are too stressed and exhausted to take their spouse on a date or play with their kids. Without genuine sources of satisfaction, their need to feel significant and admired gets transferred from people to possessions. Retailers make it easy to appease our discontent by disconnecting us from the reality of what we’re actually doing with our money. They give us plastic in order to make it hard to tell how much debt we’re racking up until it’s too late. They make it easy to buy it now by offering enticements such as no money down, no payments for a year, and six months same as cash. But when the bills come due, the conflicts between couples can be intensely negative because materialistic people have their sense of self-worth and security at risk. Their core emotions are connected to possessions rather than relationships, so they’re easily drawn in to raging fights to determine who has the power and control over spending. If you want to have happy holidays, take some time today to talk truthfully about your financial situation. Then agree on how much you have to spend on gifts this year.  Cindy says that she doesn’t have to hide her purchases anymore, nor does she have to lie about how much she’s spent. “I no longer feel like a child who tries lie to stay out of trouble,” she says. “This year I’m not feeling controlled by Jack because we’ve agreed ahead of time about what we’re going to spend.”           Their new approach to money has led to a real feeling of partnership between them. Jack feels like they’re working as a team: “We started sharing our dreams about what’s really important to us. Having agreed on what we want for our future, we’ve made a budget that we’re motivated to stick to because it takes the pressure off now and gives us security for years to come.” Give yourself a terrific gift this year. Develop a financial plan for your future that you and your loved one agree will enable you to make your most important dreams come true.   Tom Muha is a psychologist in Annapolis. He welcomes your comments and questions. To contact him call (443) 454-7274 or email him at tom@achievinghappiness.com.