In your relationship, do you feel stuck in your routine? Do you feel nothing is different and nothing changes?
You go to work, return home, spend time with the children, eat dinner, relax and go to bed. The next day, you do it again. But wait there’s the weekend.
So, on Saturday you clean the house, do laundry, and buy groceries. Sunday, you attend church, have breakfast, “relax”, and get ready for the next week. You repeat the cycle over and over. When you want to do more for your family, but you have undiscovered money problems, things get worse.
All this can lead us to a fatal boredom. It’s easy to blame your partner; you complain, argue, and attack the other person. The children complain and compare your family to their friends. You think you are wasting your time and the situation is unfixable.
This cycle affects everyone, but I think it hurts your marriage more. Constant complaints can make your partner feel that there is no more love. You cannot save the relationship; the only solution is separation. This was my life for a while. I shared with you before that I was a very negative person, always thinking the worst, complaining, blaming others for my situation. As I told you before, I was a toxic person. Not knowing I was toxic, I thought of myself as the victim. Does this sound familiar to you? If it is familiar, how do you change your situation? What do you have to do? I will tell you what I did and how it helped me, not only me, but my family.
My husband and I have 5 children, 4 boys and a girl, well the girl is already 18 years old. When you have a large family, activities can get expensive and cause money problems. Poor money management can affect the family a lot, especially your relationship with your partner.
First, the couple suffers more than the children in this cycle. The children grow up, many go to college, then they leave home. In the end, it’s just you and your partner. If things went well for you. Wouldn’t it be great if you could fix the situation together?
Even though I complained, we did a lot of things together as a family. We watched movies, my husband and sons would play sports, and we always had “low-tech” family dinners. We wanted to maximize our time with our children.
On Sundays, we would go to church with our children, sometimes go to breakfast after that, and occasionally to our friend’s house to spend time together. A day trip to the beach was normal for us because it’s only a two-hour drive. When our daughter practiced Karate weekend tournaments and nationals were a mini vacation. Looking back, we created a lot of fond memories.
You might wonder, but what was this woman complaining about? Okay, you are correct. The problem was me. I was the one who complained, who played the victim. I just wanted to do something different. At the time I was managing our finances, but not responsibly, so things I wanted to do were often out of reach. As I struggled with my feelings, I was also affecting my family, but unable to find a way out.
I was toxic, but loving my husband has never been one of our problems. The love we have helps us to face many challenges and we would need it to tackle our finances. My husband did his “nerd” thing, and we created a plan. We discussed the issue and the plan with our children, because this affected them too. Then we got to work.
I changed my mind set when doing groceries for the week, and anything else, I would just spend what we had agreed in the Budget. I would say to myself, do I need it, or do I want it? This was for everything: food, clothes, things for the house, etc. Even my daughter got used to this, and every time she saw I was going to buy something that was unnecessary or healthy, she would say to me, “Do you want it, or do you need it?”. Little by little, things started changing. Sacrifice a little to improve our situation.
The same negativity or constant complaining can lead to worsen any situation. We understand that not all of us have a job where we earn a lot of money to spend on “stuff”. Some of us work weekends, long hours, and some even work two jobs to support their family. Whatever your situation is, you can find different solutions.
What I recommend is looking at things positively. Understand the situation you are in and try to do things that are low cost.
When we get together with our children, they always talk about the things we did together as a family, times when they went out to play, the movies we watched together, the trips, the arguments, but we were always together. Memories like these are irreplaceable. It is always the little things the makes family happy.
There are several things you can do with little or no money:
Although money is not everything, it is important to budget it responsibly and as a couple. There was a time when money was “The Elephant in the Room” for us. This can affect your relationship as a couple and family. Thank God my husband could work on this and improve the situation, and the sacrifices were worth it. Not “going out”, spending only on what was necessary, saving as much as we could, paying our debts on time and down. Little by little, things started improving. We can live better, we can help our children and family if they need it, we go out more and share more time with our friends, vacation more, but above all, we can sleep peacefully knowing everything is fine. Marriages often fail because of money problems, but there is a way to avoid this.
Been There Two
We are Teresa and Andre, a couple sharing the good, the hard, and the honest parts of building a life and raising a family together. Through Been There Two, we write with the hope that our story gives others encouragement and a reminder that they are not alone.
