Excerpt from a Ramit Sethi YouTube episode (IWT 110) featuring a coaching-style conversation where a listener discusses fear of combining lives/finances with a partner. The speaker describes discomfort being the higher earner, concern about enabling patterns learned from their mother, and an explicit fear of merging finances or lives.
Deep down, I'm always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Being the one that makes more money in my relationship does not feel like a comfortable role. I'm used to someone else having a lot of money and then giving it when they felt like they wanted to.
Would you want that to be the case in your relationship?
I don't want that to be the case. But I also saw a lot of enabling of my mom. If she didn't come from a wealthy family, we wouldn't have had anything. I can't imagine her holding a job. And so just, like, giving him money or like, making his life easier, I don't know if that's the best thing to do either.
So you're here because you want to help him?
I'm here because I'm deathly scared to combine our lives.
