Are You Partners or Housemates?

What Sort Of Relationship Do You Want

No matter whether you are in a new relationship, just getting into a relationship, or have been around the block with someone for a long time; the first thing to get clear on is… what do I want from this relationship?

Is this truly a partnership where we want to have growth and connection and intimacy (physically and emotionally); where we want to be vulnerable and to fully see and be seen? 

Or are we just convenient housemates that happen to cohabit and share some of the expenses?

In many relationships the partners never move beyond behaving like teenagers or college students sharing digs. It's a yours, mine, and some sort of joint expenses pot cohabitation arrangement. 

Are you in a partnership or are you housemates? 

Perhaps you've become housemates emotionally, sensually and sexually too. 

Neither is right or wrong but make damn sure you know which one you are in and which one you want to be in. Also make sure you both know which type of relationship you want and you are in agreement on that.

This is an important question because it is key that you and your partner want the same thing. There's nothing wrong if you want to cohabit with someone because there's a lot of great convenience in that. But how you deal with your money in a deeply committed, intimate and connected relationship is completely different to how you deal with it as housemates. 

Continuing on in this Money & Love Series, I am going to presume you want an empowered, wholeheartedly connected, intimate, vulnerable, open, expanding relationship and that you are not interested in having just a housemate. 

Who Holds The Money Bag

How do you both connect your self worth with how you earn, how much you earn, whether you earn, your net worth, your assets, your debt and the way you consume money? 

Your Net Worth Is Not Your Self Worth

This is one of the greatest sources of challenge in partnership. 

Who earns more and what that means.  

We will come to how best to manage the money inflows shortly and by best I mean what research has shown to be the most generative for relationships.

Get clear on how much of your sense of self-worth is attached to your ability to earn money and contribute to the joint pot and start the deep inner work to untangle money from worth.

Revealing Power Dynamics

What do you believe about the relationship between earning and financial decision making in your relationship?
What relational power dynamic do you link to earning power? 

If there's any kind of power play or sense that the person who earns more has more authority, more power, more say, more worthiness in a relationship, you're going to have challenges.

A very important principle for a healthy relationship (and life) is to uncouple your worthiness from what you earn and how you earn it. 

What Will We Do With Our Money

How you utilise your collective financial resources is one of the most important topics to get aligned on. This is a bedrock of ensuring money is in service of you both experiencing a win-win in your partnership.

You are both committing to ultimately apprentice yourselves to love and using your money in service of that.

It’s ALL Ours

I believe in partnership you should have a joint income statement and a joint balance sheet and there should be absolute full financial transparency of the entire money flow. 

How does that sit with you? 

That does NOT mean all assets are jointly owned. 

You do not want that for many reasons, and you should never get married in-community-of-property. 

You will both have assets and bank accounts in your individual names. 

What this means is how you energetically perceive the ownership and purpose of the money in your relationship. 

All of it in service of your love and joint lives.

Your Joint Vision

To be able to align your actions and behaviours in service of something, means you need to define what that something is.

This is your joint vision. 

You need to have a big vision for the partnership that includes the things that you both want. 

• Do you want to be financially free? 
• What does financial freedom and peace look like for you? 
• What is important to you regarding your money and wealth?
• Do you agree on the importance of being debt free?
• How big an emergency fund will you create?
• What agreements will you put in place about spend decisions?  
• What are your views on investing?

You're going to have different goals and dreams, but if there's not a lot of overlap in the way you want to live day to day and the financial direction you want to head in - there's going to be challenges. 

A Bad Reason To Stay

A lot of people stay in relationships with misaligned visions and values because of another set of stories they have about love and commitment and duty and religious guilt. 

This causes deep frustration and resentment. 

Vulnerability, intimacy and love don’t hang around 

with frustration and resentment.

If one person in a partnership is betraying themselves in order to keep the relationship together, feeling they have to endure, compromise, tolerate, rescue, or twist themselves into a pretzel in order to be safe, acceptable, loved they will end up resenting the other and the relationship. 

Self betrayal never creates intimacy, and this type of interaction usually has disempowering financial consequences. 

When we can get this right in our relationship, our money stuff can be a beautiful magnifier for intimacy and connection. But when it's not working well, it accelerates a downward spiral of self-worth and the wellbeing of the individuals involved. 

Most people in this situation would be far better off going on their own paths.
If you find yourself here.. please dig deep and ask, 

“Does continuing this relationship serve us both?”

With this clarity and a commitment to create the best framework for your love to thrive head on to Part 6 : I’ll Show You Mine and You Show Me Yours

“Take the Money and Love masterclass to expand your intimacy and your wealth”