Couple therapist explained
Why love usually ends with money
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In the column of our couples therapist Oskar Holzberg, everything revolves around typical love wisdom and its truth content, he dissects proverbs, song lyrics and famous quotes. This time: “Love ends with money”
In short: Because the love of money is the simpler love.
Now in detail: Mr. and Mrs. M. quarreled about the distribution of tasks and the love ended. Exactly at the moment when Mr. M. said in a rage: “But who does all this belong to? What are you bringing in? You live entirely at my expense!” Ms. M. froze and just murmured: “So that’s how you see it! That’s how you see it?” Mr. M. also knew that he had left the realm of love and that he couldn’t make it up to him by saying “That wasn’t meant like that”. Suddenly the blanket was gone and the ugly truth came out. The bad truth was not that Ms. M. lives in his condominium and Mr. M. has the better salary. The ugly truth was that he was wielding the economic club against them in order to be superior.
The cold rationality of mammon runs through every relationship, full of feelings, no matter how warm. Love relationships as a life community are always also economic relationships. Avarice meets waste, the good life today meets savings for a better future. There is the power of bank accounts and real estate ownership. There are dependencies due to contracts and due to missing contracts. But threatening to do so in an emotional argument is an act of violence. And where there is violence, love is lost.
Basically, we know that love ends with money. Otherwise millions of people would not starve in an incredibly rich world, otherwise it would not be day-care centers that would have cracked walls, but banks would. Wars of the Roses, in which every euro is fought for, accompany a number of divorces. Money and love do not get along because they are opposite and yet similar forces: both powerful, both abstract and real at the same time. You can focus on anything and connect us to anything. We can develop love for everything. And put a price on everything. Love enhances and makes unique. Money devalues and makes exchangeable.
Love vs. economic power
When we are abandoned, or when we fear losing love, then we often substitute money for love. We replace one power with another. The lost emotional security in love through an emotional security that can also give us ownership.
But the safety of love is based on mutual vulnerability, while that of money is based on control. And it is precisely this control that we try to regain when we feel threatened in our need for love and approval: by fleeing to a safety where we are not dependent on the other. That’s the message of the economic club wielded by Mr. M.: I’m not as dependent on you as you are on me.
That is why love is always replaced by money. We should never forget that this can happen. The monster of economic power that is always lurking in the background cannot be defeated forever, even in a romantic relationship. We can only take away his power as long as love is still strong. And do everything we can to keep our economic dependencies as low as possible and regulate them as clearly as possible. That’s damn unromantic. But power was never romantic.
