When they surveyed a new group of married participants online, and asked them to what degree they shared financial goals with their partners-and about their relationship satisfaction and how they managed their finances-they found that the degree of shared goals seemed to account for why pooling resources led to more happiness. Why would that be? Garbinsky hypothesizes that pooling money may be related to having a sense of shared goals. “Just thinking of this windfall of cash as ‘our money’ and not just ‘my money’ triggered these higher-order beliefs about their relationship.” “We were actually quite surprised that we were able to find this effect using a relatively simple task,” says Garbinsky. This was true whether or not the participant’s partner was with them at the time. Then, they answered questions about their relationship satisfaction.ĭespite this relatively minor messaging, those who marked their bag with both names rated their relationship higher than those with only a single name on it. Some participants were randomly assigned to put their name on the bag, while some were told to put their and their partner’s name on the bag (whether or not the partner was present with them). They recruited people in committed relationships who were on their way to a college football game and offered them a plastic bag full of nickels (supposedly to buy a commemorative mug). To get at that, Garbinsky and her colleagues did an experiment. Initial dissatisfaction in a relationship could then lead to a later breakup, and pooling money may not be the real underlying factor. Of course, it’s always possible that people who had concerns about their partner from the start of their marriage might also choose to keep money separate. “The power of financial conversations is something that’s really important and probably a key driver of why we’re seeing these longitudinal effects.” Shared goals means more happiness “Feeling like we’re on the same team-like we’re setting financial goals together and talking about things-these are all facilitated by the fact that we’re pooling our finances together,” she says. So, she says, while sharing resources can lead to conflict, it might also drive conversations. Why would that be? Garbinsky thinks that when you pool your finances, it enables you to have more transparency in your relationship in terms of how much money you have and how it’s being spent. “But when we look at these thousands of people, on average, we do see that pooling resources matters for relationship satisfaction-especially for lower-income individuals.” “There’s a lot of talk about financial independence and spending money the way you want to spend it,” says lead researcher Emily Garbinsky of Cornell University. In the British Cohort Study, pooling resources also reduced the probability that a couple would split up. In both sets of participants, those who pooled their resources were significantly happier in their relationship than those who didn’t pool resources at all or only pooled them partially, with those who didn’t combine them at all being the least happy of the bunch. Among those participants, the researchers could see how pooling resources affected relationship happiness at one point in time (2000) and whether it predicted a divorce in the intervening years. They also looked at data from the British Cohort Study-a longitudinal study of children born in Britain during a single week in 1970. In a 2022 study, researchers surveyed over 1,000 married adults about their relationship satisfaction and how they managed their financial resources-whether their money was pooled, partially pooled (where some accounts were kept separate), or kept completely separate.
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