When
teaching money management classes, I often cite statistics from authoritative
sources such as Psychology Today and American Association for Marriage
and Family Therapists indicating that arguments about money are responsible for
more couples breaking up than even infidelity.
I
may have to modify my presentations. According
to studies cited in the Wall Street Journal, the average American
household has 18 arguments a month over…dishes; “from leaving them in the sink
to who should empty the dishwasher.” The
paper even interviewed couples about the subject and referred to an interview
with the prime minister of Great Britain that touched on the subject of how he
and his wife differ on how to load a dishwasher.
Eighteen
arguments a month. More than one every
two days. That very well may supersede
money as to frequency, if not in intensity, as a subject for marital fighting. But it got me to thinking about how the matter
of dishwashing has evolved between my wife and me. Our first house did not have a dishwasher,
and that in itself led to some “discussions” about prioritizing home
improvements or listing desirable features to have in our second house. But for years now we’ve had a dishwasher, and
it is almost never a subject of discussion.
How did we get there?
Neither
of us had a dishwasher in our childhood homes; so when we finally purchased one
as adults, there was a bit of a learning curve.
Rinse before loading? How to load? Who empties it? Who washes what could not go in the
dishwasher? My only “lesson” in
dishwasher science came from my brother who worked for a while in a college
cafeteria to earn his way through school.
He would come home and tell the family how the workers there packed the
silverware so tightly together in the dishwasher that he could not fathom how
they possibly got clean. I think he
started packing his own plasticware when he ate there. So my take-away? Load the dishwasher strategically to maximize
water flow and promote thorough cleaning.
Unfortunately, I didn’t explain this very well to my wife, and she did
not appreciate my undoing her machine-loading job to re-organize the dishes and
utensils. But I still don’t think we
argued 18 times every month. In fact, my
insistence on there being a correct way to stack the dishes eventually led her
to just leave the whole task to me. So
now nearly always (like 99 times out of 100) I load and unload the dishwasher
and handwash what I choose not to cram into the machine. I won that battle, huh?
Reading
the Wall Street Journal article left me pondering whether there might be
lessons in all this for how to handle arguments about money—which I am still
convinced are generally much more serious than proper dishwasher loading. But if there are any lessons that carry over,
they are lessons in what NOT to do. For
example, neither partner in a couple should throw up his/her hands and turn
over all financial matters to the other, just to avoid fights. First, it just won’t work. Attitudes and emotional reactions, learned in
childhood from our own parents’ relationship with money, are woven too tightly
into money matters to just surrender control to someone else without some
resentment creeping in. And second, if
that partner dies, becomes disabled, or just leaves, the other will be hobbled
by not having been involved in financial affairs and may even be unable to
handle them alone. It has become a
problem for both widows and widowers and the survivors of gray divorce
especially.
So
you can cede control of the dishwasher or the remote to your partner, but
insist on being involved in financial decision-making.
Until
next time,
Roger
“Behold,
how great a matter a little fire kindles!” James 3:5 KJV
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