The joint checking account is a system of oppression that needs dismantling — or something like that.
All available evidence suggests that couples are not only less likely to wed, but they are also less likely to merge their finances as fully as in the recent past.
If you have a bunch of married 30-something-year-olds as friends, you may have already noticed something on Venmo: A lot of husbands reimbursing their wives for half the groceries or wives paying hubby for half the water bill.
“My parents see our finances like, ‘What’s yours is your husband’s,'” one millennial married woman told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “I just don’t see it that way.”
This peculiarity of modern “enlightened” man isn’t grounded in some technocratic adherence to best practices but in a religious devotion of sorts — a worship of autonomy.
All the best data undermine this religious practice, suggesting that, just as marriage is good for us, so sharing is good for marriage.
In one recent study, scholars randomly assigned some newlyweds to keep all accounts separate, others to make all accounts joint and a third group to do as they wished.
“Couples assigned to maintain completely separate and those left to their own devices showed significant declines in relationship quality over time,” the researchers found. “But couples who had merged all their money into a joint account did not exhibit those same declines. They maintained the quality of their relationship and also showed greater financial harmony than the other couples.
The New York Times, where there is great tension between the journalist’s pursuit of science and expert opinion on the one hand and its readership’s aversion to anything that resembles the preaching of traditional marriage and family structure, waded into this discussion.
A quick note for the conservative reader: An overwhelming majority of the Times readership is likely practicing traditional marriage and family structure, but like good progressives, they are loath to preach what they practice. The radical minority on the Left — the ones who want to dismantle everything that reeks of tradition — just happens to be the loudest and the most strident, charging those who disagree with bigotry and harm.
A few days before Valentine’s Day, the outlet ran an article headlined “Making Your Relationship a True Joint Venture.” The online headline was more prescriptive: “Love and Money: Why Sharing Accounts Is Good for Your Relationship.”
The outlet noted the growing number of couples who keep their finances separate.
“People want to maintain their own financial independence after marriage,” the outlet explained. They think they’re being smart. One in three American adults in one survey believed that sharing bank accounts increased marital conflict.
The outlet also noted that this seemed like a mistake.
“I feel like it’s a lot easier to hit your financial goals when you’re all working in the same direction and you both have all of the information,” one woman said.
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This triggered the believers in the God of Autonomy. One left-wing activist attacked the outlet for “warning people of the dire consequences of not leading traditional married lives. Imagine the horror: women having independent financial lives, despite being married! Societal collapse!”
Sometimes, though, tradition contains wisdom, and eventually, “the science” catches up.