You’ll Still Have to Talk to Them
From my very unofficial polling of people I meet, money and parenting issues are the two biggest causes of divorce. I had a slightly funny, slightly tragic conversation with a friend recently. We were commiserating over both having separated from our spouses because we couldn’t get on the same page about money or parenting. Then we looked at each other and said, at almost the same time: yup, and we still have to deal with our exes on exactly those two things, even now that we’re divorced.
For anyone newly separated, I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this.
That’s the irony. Getting divorced doesn’t get you out of discussing parenting and money with your ex. If anything, it requires more communication, not less, since you’re now doing it across two households instead of one, usually with someone you’re not especially motivated to talk to in the first place. You’ll likely hire lawyers and counsellors and spend real money figuring out how to communicate at all during the process. Then, once you finally have a separation agreement, you’ll spend a couple more years figuring out how actually to implement it. Because even when something is written down clearly, you and your ex will probably interpret it differently anyway.
When we signed our agreement, I felt such relief. I thought we finally had a map, something clear enough to settle every future parenting and money question. I was wrong. It was naive to think we’d suddenly interpret things the same way, when we’d never managed to before. We kept fighting over what individual sentences meant. Our kids kept getting caught in the middle.
The agreement itself never solved anything. The only thing that actually helped was learning to communicate with each other based on our individual communication quirks, needs, and values, something I resisted for a long time before finally adopting it, after a full year of being repeatedly blindsided by how differently my ex read the same words I’d read.
Eventually, you’re going to have to learn to actually communicate with your partner about the big things, parenting and money chief among them. The only real choice is timing: do it after things have already gone sideways, or do it proactively, before you build a life and a family with someone, to find out whether you actually can communicate with them at all.
