Financial Warfare

I drove my new car at an autocross yesterday. How I did (badly) is much less interesting than the fact that I got to spend the day hanging out with a bunch of people that are normally outside my social circle. Car events are fun like that. You get people of all ages from all walks of life that happen to all like cars. They range from people that like terrible cheap little cars like mine, to people that are willing and able to spend many many multiples of that for something that isn't anything more than a toy to play with on weekends. Variety. It's fun.
I had conversations with two people from the weekend that made me think a quite a lot about money and relationships and raising kids. Both of them were guys, and both of them had wives that didn't work, so it was fun to contrast and compare with my own situation. The first talk was with a young man with an adorable 7 week old baby that was there at the races. I spent about two hours working the course with him and he liked to talk. He's young, still in college, has a wife and a baby. He went out of his way to make it clear that spending money on his car was what was important to him even though his wife disagreed. Now, it might have been nothing more than a show of testosterone, I don't really know, but he was bragging about spending money he wouldn't even have for a few weeks on his car, which was pissing off his new postpartum wife. The second conversation I had occured because I wasn't willing to give up my seat in the shade. I found a great covered picnic table where I could rest between working and driving. About 5 minutes later a whole car club of quite well off older folks showed up to have a pizza party at that spot. I stayed and got sucked into their conversation, they were really very nice. Among all of the things discussed, the one that struck me was a gentleman talking about how his wife demanded something for the house every time he bought a new car. New furniture, a room redone, something. This last time she decided that he had spent enough money that she wanted a whole new house and she was shopping for floor plans. Again, this is mostly guys, sitting around in a very many environment telling stories, so it's hard to pull the truth out of it completely, but it was interesting to listen to and think about.
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These two guys were warring with their spouses about money, and sort of bragging about it. There were threats and power struggles over who decided where a dollar went. I can't believe that either house was happier because of it. Marriage is a team sport, and winning often depends on putting the success of the family and the marriage in front of gains for just one person. My wife and I disagree about money, as any two people will, and in that way I could relate to the two guys I talked to. What they seemed to be lacking, or were acting like they were lacking, is some form of monetary teamwork in their marriages. Money is listed as the number one thing that couples argue about, and it's listed at the number two reason for divorce. You won't always agree about money, but you should have an agreed upon plan for financial goals. Once you've agreed to marry and you have kids, the rest doesn't exactly sneak up on you. You have to pay your bills every month. You need a place to live. Your kids might well want to go to college and it doesn't take much math to figure out when that's going to occur. You also probably don't want to work until you die, so there's retirement to think about. These are the big things, the things you need to find common ground on if you want to have peace. Money can't buy happiness, that is true, but it doesn't have to be used for war either.
I think my wife likes is when I go out and socialize with other people. I always come home and give her a big hug and tell her how happy I am that we're married. We're a team, and though we have very different roles on the team, we have common goals. We both want everything in life, and we've realized that for us, the best way to get there is division of labor. We do very different things so that we will end up in the same place.