Love & Money: Dealing with power imbalance feelings

May 5, 2017 7:56 AM

This was me. I need some more advice about how to handle my feelings about financial inequity in my relationship.

My long-term partner receives annual cash gifts of mid-five figures yearly from their parents. That’s just a few thousand more than both of our take home salaries, respectively. So their cash inflow is about double mine yearly.

We did talk about this and my feelings of envy (which make me feel quite shameful) and they did acknowledge that they did feel a bit private about the money in the past, but are now able to be more open about it. So it’s not a secret – but it is a sensitive topic. I try to avoid bringing it up.
The money is theirs, but a few times a bit of it has been used for things like parts of a vacation. For example they might cover the flights to our vacation to Amsterdam, while we both would still divide the other costs equally. And in fact, I think I want to stop accepting this help totally in the future. I don’t really need the help (it’s nice, sure) but the power balance issues it creates (at least for me) are hard to cope with. They don’t really understand my “unequal power balance” feelings, but I think I did not articulate them well.

Last time I posted this question, I showed the answers to my partner and they said they agreed with this particular comment: “Wait. So basically you have financial parity and you're envious that he's receiving gifts? The only advice I can offer in that case is to do whatever you do when friends get amazing gifts.”

My feeling at the time were: “I am not your friend we have been together for years at this point – I don’t get envious of my friends, but we are supposed to be a team.”

The other thing that creates tension for me is that they own the house we live in outright – the mortgage is paid off. I am not on the deed (it was purchased with family money and the parents want it to remain only in partner’s name – partner does not want to rock the boat with their parents.) I feel like a guest in the house. (I am not actually treated like a guest at all – it’s just a feeling inside of me.) All bills are split evenly, except for bills related directly to the equity of the house – I don’t pay for any improvements/maintenance. I do pay half of all operating expenses as I think I should. Partner likes to get my opinion on household matters like should we build that new addition? Should we change the garage door? And I do give my thoughts, but I don’t give strong opinions (I am quite agreeable) as it’s ultimately their house. Plus they pay for that stuff so I feel like it’s not really my call.

I have turned this over in my mind and I don’t think it’s really the money per se. I make a good living and I am on track with my retirement planning. It’s the lack of team-ness maybe? Or it could really be just very unbecoming jealousy...and I am kidding myself.

Logical me says it’s their money and their house – we agreed not to merge finances when we moved in together and I have to just deal with my feelings of power imbalance/less-than-ness and keep up my own savings/financial planning – which I am good about.

We are not married, but we have been talking about that in the last month. We are thinking about getting formally engaged next year. But there would be a prenup and I am not sure how I feel about that either. I hate the fact that I think about this. I kinda wish there was no family money and we were just in charge of our own house/future. But that’s very selfish of me, my partner’s parents want to help them and why should they not accept it? I would (I think) if were in their shoes.

I don’t even know what answers I am looking for. I guess I want to get thoughts on how to cope with these feelings. I love this person very much and our relationship is a very happy one.

posted by anonymous to Human Relations (28 answers total)

It’s the lack of team-ness maybe?

This is exactly why, for my wife and me, all money is pooled together in one account. She makes double what I do (and works half the time!), but it's all money in one pot, regardless. We also make all financial decisions together, even if it's spending $20 that isn't completely necessary, and I know this would drive some people bonkers, and it drives me nuts sometimes, but those random $20 spending sprees add up to $100s or $1000s by the end of a month or two.

There are opposite opinions on this, and it seems that my wife and I are starting to become the minority in how we pool money together, but it's exactly the team-ness that explains the way we do it this way.

For what it's worth, I have heard worse stories about money--I know a woman who is married to her husband, their money is separated, she has to pay half of everything, but the husband makes triple what she makes. Her car is 20 years old, but her husband has two brand new pick up trucks. Her laptop still can only run Windows XP, but her husband owns all the major video game consoles. She even has to pay half the mortgage on a gigantic suburban home! He takes extravagant vacations alone because she can't afford "her half."

“I am not your friend we have been together for years at this point – I don’t get envious of my friends, but we are supposed to be a team.”

I totally agree with this. My first marriage failed because we were best friends but not partners. My wife's longest relationship before me failed because they were best friends and not partners. My wife and I have never considered us to be friends.
posted by TinWhistle at 8:10 AM on May 5, 2017 [21 favorites]

How did your partner react to your "we are supposed to be a team" statement? Because if it were anything less than full-throated, enthusiastic, yes, I want us to be a team, and I want to keep working on this with you to find some way that works for us both to feel that we are partners on that team, then that's where I would start in trying to fix this. The specifics of who pays for what, what the prenup says, etc. can be worked out (maybe with some neutral third-party help from a therapist) if the underlying we are a team agreement is there. If it's not there, then that's the place to focus.

As I mentioned in your last thread, I'm more or less your partner in this scenario, and I would be pretty unhappy with myself if my partner were feeling this way. I would not stop accepting the help, but I would want to look long and hard about how to use that help in a way that would benefit my partner and my relationship, and not just myself.

I think it might be worth looking outside the immediate money question and paying some attention to whether you two work as a team in other ways, to get a handle on how much this really is a partnership question versus the actual money question. And I think some couples therapy and/or premarital counselling would be a great idea, given that this is clearly a long-running issue at this point that you haven't had a ton of luck working through yourselves.
posted by Stacey at 8:12 AM on May 5, 2017 [1 favorite]

You talk a lot about your feelings about this situation, but reading through it I'm not sure why you've settled on this arrangement for managing your finances. People in long-term partnerships can have all sorts of ways of managing their money - merging or not, sharing or not - and it's really really important to agree on how you're going to do it and make sure everybody is on the same page. It sounds like you guys are not there right now.

In my relationship, when my husband was in grad school and I was working full time, he got very stressed about his lack of income and trying to make sure he paid his fair share, which spurred us to have this conversation and figure out a way that worked better for both of us. We were not married at the time, but ended up combining everything into one bucket and ceasing to think of the money as mine or his. It completely rectified the stress in our relationship and we have never had conflict or disagreement about money since.

I'm not saying you have to choose this path, but you do need to talk to your partner and be honest with how uncomfortable you are with your current arrangement. There are other ways to do it, and if your partner isn't willing to explore ideas to help you feel better, I would feel a little worried about the future.
posted by something something at 8:23 AM on May 5, 2017 [2 favorites]

For better or worse, money is often equated with power. It gives access and freedom when you have much more of it than you need. So I absolutely get your feeling of a power imbalance especially if they are not sharing more freely or at least offering to. If you don't feel like the two of you are a team and your partner would offer to help if you were in a jam then I totally get your weirdness. You should not feel like you're over there by yourself having to struggle. I get responsibility and autonomy but come on if your partner has so much extra, it gives me pause that there isn't more extra cushioning your own life.

I would want a partner to at least offer to give more, write a prenup such that I could be reasonably comfortable in the event of a breakup if they had it to spare, etc. Even if I refused to accept. The offer communicates team playerness. I would also want a partner to go to bat for me with their family to defend generosity and sharing of resources. I would feel like we weren't a team without that effort.

So you have a lot to sort here. Are we a team? In what ways does that show up? Do I have trouble receiving or does my partner have trouble giving, or both, or neither? Why?
posted by crunchy potato at 8:27 AM on May 5, 2017 [6 favorites]

Last time I posted this question, I showed the answers to my partner and they said they agreed with this particular comment: “Wait. So basically you have financial parity and you're envious that he's receiving gifts? The only advice I can offer in that case is to do whatever you do when friends get amazing gifts.”

Love is not enough, if the person you love wants a very different kind of relationship and lifestyle from the one you need and want. To me, the above statement is the most telling in your post. Your boyfriend of seven years basically thinks of you as a good friend, rather than a lifelong partner and part of his "team." There's nothing wrong with him wanting a romantic relationship with that kind of autonomy, but it really sounds like it is in direct conflict with what you want. I think you need to do some serious soul-searching about what it is you want out of a serious, romantic relationship separate from the one you're currently in. It certainly sounds like he is the one who is setting the terms of the relationship and you are in the position of either accepting those terms or compromising your wants to fit around his. That is a great recipe for the kind of resentment that will kill the relationship eventually.
posted by scantee at 8:27 AM on May 5, 2017 [22 favorites]

I think you should talk about splitting the house costs in a more equitable way. There are near infinite opinions about how prenups should be structured and whether they are good or bad or whatever, but I think if you were paying into the home's equity (and then entitled to that portion later if you split up or whatever), you'd feel less like you're just staying in HIS home. It's understandable that you feel weird about that arrangement.
posted by cakelite at 8:43 AM on May 5, 2017

It might be helpful to examine whether your partner considers this yearly gift as part of his normal income, or whether he considers it a windfall.

In our dual-income household, we split expenses according to the Suze Orman method, which is, each person pays expenses according to the percentage of the total income that they earn. So if my spouse earns 60% of our total income and I earn 40%, then he pays 60% of all of the bills, and I pay 40%. That includes extras like vacations and major assets (home, cars, etc). (In your case, I understand why you would remove any expenses for the home from your equation, and I agree that you should not be paying any expenses on an asset that you do not own.)

So, back to how your partner considers that gift income; if he considers it a normal part of his income, then it should be factored into the percentage of bills that he pays.

If he considers it a windfall, then what is he doing with that money? Is it his "play" money? If so, then he would be spending that money to do fun things with the people he wants to do fun things with. You just happen to be the person that he wants to include in all of his fun. If that's the case, it makes it a little more palatable to accept it as a gift. If it makes you feel better, plan fun things once in a while as your budget allows, but don't allow yourself to get wrapped in a financial tit-for-tat.

(ETA, for clarification: If he considers the money windfall/play money, then your joint lifestyle and expenses should not count on that money. It should truly be a bonus, while your daily lifestyle reflects only the normal paycheck income.)

I suspect that some of your anxiety stems from not having the security of owning a house yourself. Are you saving any money towards that goal? You don't have to live there, but you could have a condo that you use as a rental, or you could just have some money banked that if you and your partner did part ways, you wouldn't feel like you were left on the street.

As far as a prenup goes, that's kind of a non-starter for me. Either you are being accepted into the family or your aren't, and that includes assets. If, for example, your partner were to pass before you - would the home go back to his extended family, or would it be yours? There's a lot to unpack around this issue, it's probably a separate AskMe in and of itself, plus you need really good legal advice. If there must be a prenup, well, it needs to protect you just as much as it protects him.
posted by vignettist at 8:50 AM on May 5, 2017 [4 favorites]

it was purchased with family money and the parents want it to remain only in partner’s name – partner does not want to rock the boat with their parents.

If it was a gift to him, they have no say in it and the best way to not rock the boat is to simply not tell them when you become part owner of the house you live in and partially pay for.

If he is obligated to do and not do certain things with the money and property he receives, he is effectively an employee of these family members, not a gift recipient. Maybe that will actually help you feel less jealous -- even though he has more money, you're free and he's dependent. I love money and I have no particular problem with people who have it, but to protect his primary relationship, any adult can say, kindly and respectfully:

Your generosity means a lot to me, and I am grateful for any help you choose to give me, but I cannot accept gifts that come with attached obligations -- I do not expect anything and do not feel entitled to anything, but I can only accept gifts that are gifts, free and clear. If this means you will not be able to continue making such generous gifts as you have in the past, I completely understand, I am still grateful for what you have already done, and there are no hard feelings or resentment on my end.

I would expect this from him.

& don't agree to a prenup that is not designed with your best interests in mind. That means, most likely, don't allow his family or his family lawyers to be in charge of drawing it up. If it's intended to protect him and not to protect both of you, it's not a good idea for you.
posted by queenofbithynia at 9:21 AM on May 5, 2017 [7 favorites]

If he is obligated to do and not do certain things with the money and property he receives, he is effectively an employee of these family members, not a gift recipient.

I came here to say this. Because this has been the heart of the matter when I've been in this situation. If a gift as strings, or task, or rules attached it's not a gift. It's a payment.

I also find generational wealth profoundly distasteful. So ymmv.
posted by French Fry at 9:35 AM on May 5, 2017 [4 favorites]

I see two things going on here too. You said:

we agreed not to merge finances when we moved in together

This is the current agreement and given that you made this agreement, I think your partner's point of view is reasonable. It's not mine -- my husband and I have totally merged finances which creates its own little brand of crazy -- but I can see it.

However you now want a deeper sense of partnership -- and that's okay. You're allowed to reopen this agreement. I think that's a very serious talk and well worth having. If your current partner isn't willing to reopen this agreement now that you are living in the reality of both it and your deepening life together, what's your view at that point?
posted by warriorqueen at 9:56 AM on May 5, 2017 [2 favorites]

It sounds like your partner prioritises their relationship with their parents over their relationship with you (not wanting to rock the boat with their parents or make accommodations in their own actions by having *you* swallow your justified feelings). Do they see a time when you will be a priority in their life or is the dependance they have on their parents their primary concern? Relationships aren't just money, but my experience has been that people that don't share money with their partners (in a way they have mutually agreed) often don't fairly share other aspects of relationships like childcare, chores, and emotional labour.
posted by saucysault at 10:06 AM on May 5, 2017 [4 favorites]

Yes, it sounds like you need to renegotiate; your current arrangement isn't working for you emotionally any more. It's entirely reasonable to bring your arrangements up again, especially after so long.

You should be aware, though, that it's also not unreasonable not to want to merge finances prior to marriage. Your partner would have had to be an idiot not to take a down payment for a house to avoid creating feelings of power imbalance in someone who could get up one morning, walk out, and never come back, and he may feel the same way about forgoing a gift the size of his yearly salary. I'm not a great admirer of marriage as an institution, but at least it does create rules for the distribution of assets if the family breaks up. So he may consider your request as effectively a push towards marriage. His reaction will be very important. Does he listen, does he recognize the validity of your concerns even there are competing practical issues, does he seem to want to strengthen the partnership? If not, then even marriage probably won't fix the problem.
posted by praemunire at 10:08 AM on May 5, 2017 [2 favorites]

I have some friends who were divorces after a long marriage - they lived in a home owned by one of their mothers. This meant when they split, the house was not a marital asset and the other partner was left with a pretty limited share of what had previously seemed to be collective assets (or for other people may have been marital assets). For so many people a home and the growth in equity/appreciation is their biggest financial asset. So, one way or another you should be considering what the opportunity cost is here. Are you paying 'rent' to your partner's & family, who are acting as your landlord? If so, is being a renter how you would expect things to be?

Is your equity growing somewhere else that is yours alone, or is it all going to paying for a lifestyle dictated by your partner's financial situation? There are ways around this situation that protect you and those may make you feel a little better about the whole thing.
posted by vunder at 10:39 AM on May 5, 2017 [3 favorites]

Maybe as you move toward engagement it's time to re-negotiate how you handle your finances and to simultaneously delve into what is going on for you (jealousy needing individual attention or feelings indicative of a relationship issue needing couple's therapy attention), perhaps with the aid of a therapist? It sounds like you prefer a merged financial setup instead of receiving small benefits of your partner having more cash on hand. I am in more like the position your partner is in my marriage and use my side cash to help pay for things like our wedding, vacations, or home improvement. I wish my house was paid off so that my partner had none of that expense -- that is nice that you have that.

It was very important to my painfully-divorced parents that I get a prenup because I came into my relationship with a house (paid for by me, but still) and retirement savings and my parents wanted whatever inheritance they gave me to be mine in the event of divorce. But! Everything that goes on aside from the house and the retirement/inheritance is shared. And, if we stay together as I expect we will, the retirement/inheritance will be shared too because we are a team and if we move, that new house will be joint. The prenup just prevents either of us from ransacking the other's retirement in the unlikely event of a midlife crisis/severe mental illness/whathaveyou. (I watched this happen with my own parents and it was a total nightmare.) The prenup probably does not address events like death, just dissolution of the marriage. You'll need to think about wills too, so this is all part of a broader discussion about how you want to live your lives and handle money.
posted by *s at 10:42 AM on May 5, 2017 [1 favorite]

First of all, when you posted your last question, you gave no indication that the gifts were so large. They're effectively equal to his annual salary! That changes things a LOT, and with that context, the answers would have been different. Including, I'm going to guess, the answer that resonated the most with your partner.

Second of all, please stop feeling shame about being envious. Envy is a perfectly normal feeling, and in this situation, would be impossible to avoid for almost anyone.

Third, you have every right to want to feel like a team. You've invested 7 years in this relationship and are now talking marriage; you should feel like partners in every way. Do you feel fully supported by him? Are you in his will? What would happen to the house if he were to die? If the answer is anything but "I would inherit it in full", I have to question how much your boyfriend really cares about you.

It's worth asking - what are his reasons for keeping finances separate; what led to this arrangement, and is he willing to change it?

You say your relationship is very happy but you do not sound it. And he does not sound like someone who has your best interests at heart. If you cannot talk about this together in a satisfactory way, perhaps try couples counselling?
posted by yawper at 10:46 AM on May 5, 2017 [3 favorites]

A million times this: & don't agree to a prenup that is not designed with your best interests in mind. That means, most likely, don't allow his family or his family lawyers to be in charge of drawing it up. If it's intended to protect him and not to protect both of you, it's not a good idea for you. AND this: Is your equity growing somewhere else that is yours alone, or is it all going to paying for a lifestyle dictated by your partner's financial situation? There are ways around this situation that protect you and those may make you feel a little better about the whole thing.

It's quite possible his family is one of those that sacrifices some amount of personal relationships, personal freedom and life choices to the maintenance of family wealth. You get to decide if you're willing to tie yourself to a partner and a family who thinks of his "family money" as never yours but maybe will think of it as your children's money. If you are not able to have your own retirement money, your own assets, your own nest egg while he wholly owns your house and you split all expenses equally, you are vulnerable and you are not being fully valued in your relationship.

Money and differences in money really can make or break relationships. You are emotionally estranged from your relationship because you live in and nurture a physical home you have no stake in and little legal right to. You are emotionally stressed by your partner because he withholds his good fortune from you. Do you feel "inferior" because he is accumulating wealth that he won't share with you and because your lifestyle (possibly, it's hard to tell) prevents you from accumulating your own?

Seven years you have invested (right?) and you have not been elevated to the same rank & privilege as your partner. Will you get that when you get married? Or will you have to have special permission to use his checkbook? Will your house get titled into a trust for your kids, but not titled in your name ever? Will you always be kept as something other than family? Hard questions that he may not have thought about enough to answer but you need to know the answers before deciding if that's okay for the rest of your life.
posted by crush at 10:53 AM on May 5, 2017 [9 favorites]

The problem here is not you and not your partner. The problem is these very large gifts from family come with strings attached. The parents are why your name is not on the deed. The parents are why partner is insisting on a prenup.

So, the hard conversation you need to have with partner is this: Will marriage actually make you the number one priority? Or will they still have him by the shirt hairs?

When push comes to shove, marriage is supposed to exceed the loyalty to other family. This may not be possible if he lives in fear of losing these so called gifts which are not being freely given. They come with significant strings attached.

Will he choose you over their money? Are you both okay with losing that money if the parents decide to be dicks and put a stop to helping support him?
posted by Michele in California at 11:00 AM on May 5, 2017 [7 favorites]

If I bought a house for a child of mine, I'd darned well buy it for the child and not half for the current romantic attachment, especially if there were no kids involved. This is just a practical matter. Making no judgments about OP or the strength of OP's relationship, the fact remains, she could leave tomorrow. That's a huge gift to someone without a formal commitment to the family!

Two of my family members currently are in long-term relationships with people who own the apartment they live in. One pays formal "rent," I think the other has a more joint approach to expenses. This kind of situation isn't inherently exploitative, so long as one person is not investing in a house in which they have no interest in the equity. It sounds like OP's situation has been crafted specifically to avoid that problem, which is actually a good sign.

I'm not sure it's clear from OP's post that the prenup is being imposed by the parents. Many people think that in any situation where one or both partners brings significant assets to the marriage, it's worth resolving these matters in advance. That could include OP's partner. It's definitely true, though, OP, that if it comes to that, you'll really want your own counsel to review to make sure your interests are properly protected.
posted by praemunire at 11:28 AM on May 5, 2017 [7 favorites]

Marriage is a formal and legal commitment.

OP should sort this issue one way or another before marriage. If you marry this person knowing the family expects to remote control your partner with money without getting this issue sorted first, you can expect the power problems to get far worse, not better. Right now, just living with this person, there is no legal expectation that you are entitled to any of their assets. Marriage typically legally entitles you to half. If the parents have an issue with you being entitled to part of his assets, the act of getting married will significantly escalate the conflict because it will give you legal rights you do not currently have. At that point, all this polite fiction will stop working and they will need to obviously maneuver to actively cut you out in order to keep giving to him on the very much strings attached basis they prefer.

I would not marry this man without having this properly sorted.
posted by Michele in California at 12:18 PM on May 5, 2017 [3 favorites]

Marriage typically legally entitles you to half. this is not at all true in modern domestic relations law in the US.
posted by crush at 12:45 PM on May 5, 2017 [1 favorite]

It is generally true in community property states of most assets acquired during marriage, though it can certainly be far more complicated than that, depending upon exactly where you live.

And it's a nit. This issue needs to be sorted before marriage. The real power issue here lies mostly in the behavior of the wealthy parents and their expectations. This problem will likely get worse with marriage as it confers rights that living together does not typically confer.
posted by Michele in California at 1:11 PM on May 5, 2017

Even in community property states, pre-marital assets are not marital assets and that's not nit-picking. It's a hugely complicated process where if one party has parents giving you houses and 50k annual gifts, the other party will lose the legal-wrangling. But it's really not the point. Never take legal advice from ask.me. Even from the lawyers here, like me.
posted by crush at 1:40 PM on May 5, 2017

There are a lot of answers above that address the emotional side of things, and they are important and you should consider them. I am offering something different - a suggestion for a practical initial step to a bit more equity.

How about - you and your partner get a joint bank account, and then you each contribute an agreed-upon percentage of each of your incomes to that account each week or each month. Not a dollar amount - a percentage; like, 40% or 60% or whatever you are each comfortable with. Your 40% is going to be less dollarwise than his 40%, yeah, but you'll both "feel it" the same, because 40% of his income is 40% of his income. Once you've set that up, then you use that money to pay for all shared expenses. Food, utilities, repair, car, gas, etc.

This would a) affirm the fact that you are a team, b) take some of the burden off you (splitting expenses "equally" still isn't fair if one of you is making more than the other, because $50 has more of an impact on someone making $50K a year than it does $150K a year, say), and c) still give each of you the financial freedom to do whatever you want for fun with the rest of your money. You can still use it for retirement savings, or to buy clothes, or whatever.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:45 PM on May 5, 2017

I've been the other person in this relationship. It's come down to how my family and parents view money, which for both my parents has been a very "mine is yours", and if they didn't have money to give they'd be giving me the shirt off their backs. It's how they love. But for the partners I've had, their families have been very much a you survive independently and a lot of importance is pressed on never asking or receiving help.

Do you wish your partner lived completely independently of their parents? Or do you wish your parents gave more? If you have kids, is how much you support them in adulthood going to be an issue?
posted by Dynex at 4:14 PM on May 5, 2017

I can't understand why these gifts are supposed to be treated as something other than income when you're dividing up expenses. How does it matter whether they earned the money as a salary or as a bonus or won the lottery or were given a gift. How does it not go into their proportion of income? Sure, it might be irregular; so is commission income.

I don't mind the idea of mostly separate finances in a long term relationship, but not this level of inequality. The only person I've ever known who had this arrangement was in an emotionally abusive relationship and (thank god) has since gotten out.
posted by gideonfrog at 5:05 PM on May 5, 2017 [5 favorites]

I don't know what you should do, but I can share my experience. There are some parallels.

Years ago I was in a 6.5-year relationship that broke up for various reasons, but money was a big one. Like you, we split our expenses even though he had way more money than I did (in his case it was income, not gifts). Like you, I felt like we weren't part of a "team," and he was happy with the arrangement because it allowed him to save a lot and spend what he liked on his own hobbies/projects. I felt like he didn't really see me as a full partner so I couldn't see him as a full partner. I spent way too much time trying to convince myself that my feelings weren't valid and that the situation should be fine for us because it was fine for other people. No amount of mental gymnastics could fix the resentment, though. It took me a long time to admit to myself that I resented him and this was not the life I wanted.

Now I'm married to someone else. Coincidentally, he also comes from a wealthy family. I actually earn more income, but he has more wealth. None of that matters, though, because it's all "our" money. There isn't a "yours vs mine" situation, except for the separate retirement accounts I keep just in case of divorce (hopefully I will never have to use them). I am so much happier this way. I don't need to make myself feel better about our situation. I don't have to bargain with him or come up with new ways of sharing our life. We just share our life and our money, and I love that.
posted by MsMartian at 8:28 PM on May 5, 2017 [2 favorites]

If you are committed to each other as partners, that means sharing the joys and burdens of life, and making decisions based on what would benefit you *as a unit*, not as individuals. For example, if I lost my job or became too disabled to work, I would expect my partner not just to support me, but to think of the income loss as *our* misfortune, and *our* problem to solve. This does not necessarily mean we have to pool all our money in a single pot, but it does mean that when it comes to the bigger things it is understood that we will both make our decisions with the best interests of our partnership in mind. For example, I used to make considerably more than he did, but since we had a child, we have had to change my work to accommodate my being home more; we absorbed this with shared budget changes, with both of us taking a bit of a hit to our savings rate. When one of us had an unexpected minor windfall, we used the money for some shared goals, but also to boost the retirement savings for the partner who up until then had had less, because this is what made sense from a tax perspective, and it benefits us as a unit to each have healthy savings. I think you are right to be upset about the way your partner handles these gifts - he is not putting your family unit first, which suggests he does not think of you as a family. Some folks might say that if you're not married yet you're *not* a family, but to me marriage should be the bit of paper that confirms what you've both known in your hearts for some time - that you are a committed unit, and your interests are shared because your first commitment is to each other. Don't accept talk of marriage without evidence that it is backed up by true commitment.
posted by TheLittlestRobot at 7:12 AM on May 6, 2017 [3 favorites]

In my experience, families that give large gifts to their children attach strings to the gift - whether or not those are implicitly stated.

Your partner has to decide that you matter more than what his family thinks of him, or you. He (or she) has to decide to take the gift as a gift, say thank you very much to his family, and use it without worrying about whatever strings, implied or otherwise, come with it. If he chooses to abide by the strings, then he is not, however loving or kind he may be to you, acting as a fully committed partner. He is choosing to maintain the family wealth, and the rules attached to it, over his own personal feelings. In the long run, that choice on his part will alienate you and probably result in your relationship with him coming to an end.

With families like this, to quote crush, it is indeed quite possible his family is one of those that sacrifices some amount of personal relationships, personal freedom and life choices to the maintenance of family wealth. People who have money have it by hanging on to it (among myriad other reasons.) They don't share. They place value on money over a person's emotional state, even if that person is their own child. It may be that his family is pressuring him to comply with their wishes, and that they don't care at all what he really wants to do with it or whom he wants to share his life with.

You have to make very sure that the money he is receiving is his to do with as he likes, and that he is doing with it what he pleases without being influenced by his family. You have to decide if he will "go to bat" for you, as somebody else commented. Then, and only then, can you decide if you feel comfortable with a partner who has the advantage of such a considerable yearly gift. Only then, in my opinion, can you have an honest and fair discussion on what your relationship is to be moving forward, and how the two of you are going to handle your finances.
posted by Crystal Fox at 5:10 PM on May 7, 2017 [1 favorite]