[willio58]

Love this in concept, but life turns out to be complicated over the long term. It's easy to say it's "our" money when you both agree on the same goals and life trajectory, but people have a propensity for change. In 10 years, what if your life goals start diverging? Will it still be "our" money?

This isn't a personal question for you, but more something to consider even for myself. I love simplicity and I love trust. But through the years I've experienced relationships that transform from pure love and admiration to pure confusion and being on completely different pages. This may be because I'm young, and maybe relationships become more straightforward later in life. But something tells me people never become less complicated, maybe they just become more complacent.

That all being said, I recognize that sometimes overthinking or planning for the worst can be a form of self-sabotage. By you trusting your partner with the things most important to you, including money, you are creating a stronger bond by laying it all out on the table and working as a single unit towards your life goals.

[tremon]

To me it doesn't look like you're describing money problems specifically, but marriage problems in general. If you and your partner no longer agree on the same goals and life trajectory, it's time to re-evaluate the relationship. When you start squabbling over details such as who owns what or who earns what, that's probably a symptom that there's deeper issues at play.

That's not to say that every re-evaluation should lead to a breakup. But I think not acknowledging that drift and fighting over the symptoms probably leads to worse outcomes than openly addressing the bigger issue.

[countfalafel]

Consider that even if a married couple maintain strictly separate accounts, negotiate with one another about how much of each partners' money should be spent on this or that expenditure, and live separate financial lives, in a lot of places it's still all marital property. So in the event of the (very real and frequent) diverging life goals you raise, all the hardball they played with each other doesn't even matter. I don't have the password to your bank account where you keep "your" cash, but just wait until I call my lawyer to claw back my half of our marital property!

[Youden]

> But through the years I've experienced relationships that transform from pure love and admiration to pure confusion and being on completely different pages. This may be because I'm young, and maybe relationships become more straightforward later in life. But something tells me people never become less complicated, maybe they just become more complacent.

I know everybody is different but the key for my relationship with my wife has been open communication. There's a clear pattern for us: when we don't talk about a problem, we end up getting upset with each other, but when we do talk about the problem, we come to an understanding and everything is fine.

Another key is that we love each other and if we disagree on something, we're both willing to find compromise.

There are a few big issues where a compromise might not be viable, like having kids or where to live (we're from two very distant countries), but we made sure we agreed on those pretty early on.

My point here is that I don't think age is the solution. Relationships are work. It can't all just be fun and games, you need to talk each other about stuff, build up trust that doing so is safe and be willing to compromise for each other. This is work and without it, the relationship might very well fall apart.