In the inaugural episode of "Marina on Marriage," therapist and founder Marina Edelman introduces the podcast’s core premise: marriage is built on countless small decisions about money, relationships, time, and energy rather than a single grand choice. She shares her own pivotal life decision—leaving a stable career as a financial analyst to pursue a graduate degree in therapy while raising two young children and supporting a husband who had just lost his job. Despite financial strain and fear, she chose to act from love, a decision that ultimately led to a thriving counseling practice and a supportive family. Edelman frames this choice through a "love vs. fear" decision‑making lens and references Erik Erikson’s final life stage (wisdom versus despair) to illustrate how decisions impact long‑term fulfillment. She explains how marital trust, financial collaboration, and mutual support enabled her risk‑taking, and she invites listeners to submit their own decision stories or become guests, promising future episodes that unpack the intertwined nature of money, marriage, and personal choices.
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Welcome to Marina on Marriage. Marriage isn't about one big decision. It is hundreds of small choices we make along the way. Choices about money, choices about people we love, and decisions about where we put our energy and how we spend our time. In every episode, we're going to go back to that one choice and see what happened? What does it feel like to live with that decision now? I'm Marina Edelman. I'm a marriage and family therapist. I'm founder of the True Me Method and True Me Counseling Center. I worked as a financial analyst and have been a therapist for over 20 years. Let's get into it. So I think I'm going to start, since this is the first episode, with disclosing about the one decision that I made. The decision that I made started a long time ago. Being a child of immigrants, I told my parents I wanted to be a psychiatrist, to which my parents said, no, you're good with money. You're going to go and be an accountant. And as an immigrant kid, I said, okay, I guess that's what I'm going to do. And I was good in accounting. I was so good that I even got a double major. With actuarial science degree as well. I got a job as a financial analyst. I was working for a company called Mack back in Delaware. It was the first ATM card company, and I did month-end closing statements, and I reconciled the balance sheet, and it was just a good job, but I did not feel passionate about it. I ended up then meeting my husband, who's still my husband today of 30 years. And we ended up getting married. We had children. We moved to Germany. I stopped working. We moved back to the States and I was planning to go back to work. And while I was making that decision, I realized I even got a job offer with a company called WellPoint in Southern California. I just, I thought about sitting in an office Monday through Friday and I decided I just can't do that. And I decided to go back to school and get my graduate degree. At that time, my kids were, I think, 4 and 5. I went to a pretty good school. I got so much early exposure. And that was a hard decision because during that time, My husband's company that ended up moving us to California just said that they're closing their California location and we can move to, I think it was Ohio. And we just couldn't do that. So that meant that he was out of a job and he started to look for a new job. So here we are, not a lot of money in our early 30s. 2 small kids. My husband isn't working, and I'm starting a graduate program, which I have to say was very scary. I wasn't sure if I would be good at it, honestly. I wasn't sure if this is— if we would be able to pay the tuition. I wasn't sure if I would get money back, how childcare would work out once my husband started his job. It was pretty scary. And yet it paid off because 20 years later, um, my practice is thriving. I work with an incredible staff of pre-licensed and licensed associates, and it was a really great decision. The, the whole point of how we're not supposed to make decisions based on fear, but based on love. And that is a concept that I find is extremely important. And I try to help my clients overcome some of their fears so they make some of the best decisions without any regrets. And that is really what I did. So from being proud of myself, which is hard for us sometimes to say that we're supposed to be super humble, but I am proud. And I'm so grateful that my husband believed in me as well. And during this really difficult time said, sure, go for it, completely supported me. And my little kids at that time really supported me as well. They're not so little anymore, but they were in complete support. Also, and they were excited that I was going back to school. They were going to school. I was going to school. They were studying. I was studying. It was great, not without its challenges. Those are the type of decisions that we go back and look at. And there is Eric Erickson talks about eight stages of life. In the last stage of life, the eighth one is called wisdom versus despair. In that stage, people are either super sweet and want to teach others all the wisdom that they have, or they're kind of miserable and they're unhappy. They don't like how their life turned out. And those people really struggle to make any real changes because life is short, time is running out. I really believe that making decisions based on love and not fear, well, if nothing else, even if the decision is not a good one, will help us not have those regrets. When I was thinking of this podcast and what do I want to talk about, I thought that there's— there would be— this would be a good avenue, and I want to bring people in to To really talk about money and marriage and people in our lives and our decisions and how in a way they're like nesting dolls and they all interweave into one another. If my husband wasn't supportive, maybe if we didn't have a solid marriage, he would've not been open to taking on student loans for me. Maybe if we had a breach of trust, He wouldn't have trusted me to take on such a big opportunity and that I would actually follow through with this. This is something I, he and I talk about all the time because it was such a pivotal moment in our lives and it turned out great. There have been choices in our lives that we made that were not so great, even though we trusted each other, even though it was maybe not driven by Um, fear, and yet we have no regrets about them. I'm really excited to welcome you on to my podcast. I would love to get any questions, or if you would like to be a guest, for you to email me and let me know, and we can talk about all these little choices that you made to get you here.
